From what read elsewhere, it seems that the Aliyun people are probably not in compliance with the GPL, so they are in direct copyright infringement of code written by Google and others. While this is not too surprising given the sorry state of GPL compliance in the PRC, but this gives Google every right to strong-arm anyone touching this project.
That's nothing, my most recent paper has spin right in the title!
Linux worked well if you picked up a 1-2 year old laptop, because by then you could find support for most of the hardware, but you were in for a world of hurt if you wanted anything new.
If you're buying a Laptop and want to run Linux on it, you should make sure it's certified. Of course, results are best when Linux is already pre-installed.
So, if dropping NC and ND results in a single work being relicensed under a free license, this would be a benefit.
Even if thousands of equally skillfully crafted works were no longer released under any CC license and kept proprietory because the NC or ND clause was deemed too important?
It's not like people would stop putting stuff on the internet if there were no NC/ND licenses. You will still be able to download the work and enjoy for your personal use as you don't need a license for that. Only when you want to redistribute the work or modified versions of it, the license becomes relevant.
I would like to contribute photos to wikipedia, however I don't want Monsanto or Raytheon using them for an ad campaign.
If they use your CC-BY-SA licensed photo, they have to license the entire ad back to the community. So you'd be tricking an evil company into doing something good, wouldn't that be awesome? (Anyway, won't happen, as company laywers will never allow this. So don't worry about contributing to Wikipedia.)
The thing is, if somebody besides me and them record a performance of it, who's song is that, mine or theirs?
Merely performing a song does not entitle to any copyright. In some countries (not in the US), the performers are granted so-called "related rights", which result in similar protection like copyright.
What if the performer put my notes to their modified lyrics, or vice versa?
If they modify the lyrics, the rights to the modifications, but not the original version, lie with them.
But I hope you see that the whole situation is a bit complicated, and therefore CC is not really doing everyone a favor by offering licenses with implications most artists do not understand.
I fail to see how dropping NC/ND types from CC v4.0 would be a benefit.
The idea behind the Commons is that you have a set of resources that anyone can use at his or her convenience. In the digital realm, this refers to the set of works that can be freely distributed, modified, and you are allowed to create any service based upon them. This realm, lets call it the "free world", is huge: it includes Wikipedia, Free Software, and a plethora of other projects. The beauty is that you can pretty much take any parts of the existing free world to create something new, enriching the Commons in the process.
NC and ND are not part of this blessed realm. They form isolated patches of works that cannot be combined with the rest. They will never be part of the Commons. In that way, these licenses are not better than having no license at all. Or even worse, since they create distractions by leading authors to believe they are doing a good thing when in fact they are not.
So, if dropping NC and ND results in a single work being relicensed under a free license, this would be a benefit.
I'm not afraid someone will do it better. I'm afraid that some organization will take what I've given away, copy it, make a token modification, and copyright it, thus turning the work that I made as a gift into something that has a price on it, all without paying me a dime. They might even be able to turn around and issue DMCA takedowns and sue people for performing my work, claiming that they're really performing their version rather than my version. They've now taken free artistic work and made it no longer free. In other words, they aren't really adding any value at all, just taking value from me and from the public and declaring it theirs.
DMCA takedown notices must have a statement, under the penalty of perjury, that you represent the copyright owner. Unless your company rep/lawyer wants to go to jail, you are talking about a very unlikely scenario.
An illustrative case: Pete Seeger took biblical verses and wrote the song Turn, Turn, Turn [wikipedia.org], releasing it into the public domain. Several other folk musicians performed it, and it gained in popularity, and Pete finally recorded it in 1962. In 1965, the Byrds recorded it, and now most people who've heard of the song think that they wrote it originally, and some others think Bob Dylan wrote it. Had Pete Seeger not been a relatively well-known figure, it's quite possible his contribution would have been forgotten entirely.
So what? If you want to be attributed, don't give it to the public domain. That's what CC-BY licenses are for, which of course didn't exist back then.
Say, I publish a book under my own name. I don't care if people reproduce it on their websites, and I don't care if commercial enterprises included it into their own collections. Hey, it's not the money I'm after, so they can sell it too, if they want. What I do care about however, is that nobody comes and starts modifying (adding to, modifying or deleting from) that text... because my name and reputation are associated with it.
You are free to include a mark such as a publisher's name to indicate that this is the original version and prevent its misuse using trademark law. Heck, even well-respected scientific journals such as PloS ONE or Phys. Rev. X use CC-BY.
Page 23(the "scary stuff"): Yes, he(and you) can observe the air traffic. So what? It's not secret, hasn't ever been secret, and doesn't need to be secret.
Actually, I don't think so. With the increased availability of homebrew UAVs, it is probably a bad idea to give out the information how to steer these things right into the flight path of a 747.
Even now, there are some notebooks available on their website, and you can probably get even more options when you ask them on the phone.
Patent examiners are not stupid. But their performance reviews hinge on the number of patent application cases they were able to close. Rejecting a patent is much more time consuming than accepting it, because one has to justify it towards the applicants who are most certain to appeal the decision anyway, creating even more paperwork. So there is a strong incentive for any patent examiner to just rubber stamp with approval, resulting in the mess we currently observe.
The reason behind this lies in the fact that it is politically desired to artificially inflate the numbers of patents granted in a country, because that is widely seen as an indicator for innovation. And of course, that is just another instance of Campbell's law.
Keyboard covers have been around for a while the only thing that's special about this is it comes with one as standard.
So all this fuzz is about something you could as well get today by spending maybe $200 on an Android tablet and buying a tablet holder plus keyboard for less then $20?
Easy victory for debian, as there was no manager who had to wonder how fixing the bug ASAP vs. schedule the fix for later could potentially affect his career...
According to Debian's security tracker, the stable version is still vulnerable (and unstable was fixed only two days ago).
You see but you do not observe. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes"
