What the previous poster was talking about is called the Dormant (or Negative) Commerce Clause doctrine: That even in the absence of federal legislation regulating interstate commerce, the Constitution forbids states from improperly acting to impair or discriminate against interstate commerce, such as by trying to protect local businesses from out of state competition.

And in this case, a law that said that plates legal for use on cars registered in California must be made in California probably would be unconstitutional.

No, it's fine. The publishers set a wholesale price they were happy with, and which they turned them a profit. Amazon paid it, then sold at a lower retail price than the publishers wanted. Ebook profits for publishers were never in jeopardy.

If you're in the US, yes.

The relevant part of 17 USC 109:

Of course, it might not be the best business plan. There aren't a lot of video rental stores left. But if you can make it work, go for it.

Got a case on that? AFAIK everything except phonorecords (that is, audio recordings, such as CDs) and non-console software falls squarely under first sale for rental purposes. Boilerplate notices of dubious accuracy printed on a DVD label are no EULAs.

Well, in the US, at least, it's perfectly legal to rent ordinary retail DVDs. There are good reasons to go with a distributor, such as early access to copies so that they can be on shelves and ready to go ASAP, but if you're not getting prices lower than if you just got discs retail, and worse if you're locked into a requirements contract which precludes you from shopping around, I don't know if its worth it.

In any event, it seems to be a mostly moot point now.

Well why not go back to the old system of granting copyrights for a fixed term of years? Then the copyright lasts as long as it lasts, whether the author dies or not. This means that everyone knows when the work can be expected to be in the public domain straight away, and can plan for it; authors, publishers, and third parties all.

Well, this case is taking place in the UK, and I don't know anything about their law (other than that they have wigs, which seem neat). My analysis is more or less how it would work out in the US.

In the US, a derivative work is not the same thing as a compilation. (Although I suppose it is possible to have a compilation which is itself derivative of a preexisting compilation)

Here are the relevant bits of the statute:

If the compiler has the right to make the compilations at all, which they apparently do (or is someone arguing that Ministry of Sound is itself a pirate?), then they'd automatically get a copyright on the compilation if the compilation meets the requirements for copyrightability, the main one for compilations typically being whether there was sufficient creativity in the selection and arrangement of the material compiled.

Now, it's possible that a condition for including a particular recording might be to assign the compilation copyright back to the licensor of the recording, so that they end up with the compilation copyright. But barring that, the law says that the copyright in the compilation automatically subsists in the author, i.e. the compiler. Permission is required to make the compilation, but that doesn't change the law.

Again, of course, that's how it would be in the US. In the UK, who knows?

No, in the US they have a good argument. The issue is whether there was sufficient creativity in the selection of which tracks to include, and which order to arrange them in, as to justify a copyright.

The white pages in a phone book could be copyrightable. But so long as the selection of information is merely the name of the telephone subscriber, their address, and their number, and the order is merely alphabetical, in last name order, it's not creative; all the white pages are like that, and the reason is to make them useful.

A phone book that only included certain people arbitrarily chosen by the compiler, and which arranged them in an arbitrary, creative way, could be protected. (The individual names, numbers, and addresses could still be copied; they're unprotectable facts, but they'd have to be rearranged, and ideally mixed with the information of people who were not included). But a phone book like this would be useless as a general purpose directory. A specialty directory, sure -- e.g. a phone book of places a tourist should see in a foreign city -- but this isn't usually what people want.

Here, unless the authorized compilation albums include everything (or everything that could be included subject to some non-creative constraint, such as all the recordings to which the issuer of the compilation has rights), and unless they're arranged in some uncreative order, such as chronological order, or alphabetical order, it sounds worthy of a copyright to me.

Assuming, that is, that it is copyrightable at all. This is the filtration step of the abstraction-filtration-comparison test from the Altai case. Copyrights don't protection functionality; only creative aspects of software. Actual usefulness has to go under patents instead. Thus, the algorithm used isn't copyrightable. If there are a limited number of ways to implement that algorithm, particularly if external constraints like efficiency are involved, the implementation merges with the noncopyrightable functionality, and both are uncopyrightable. Further, commonplace bits of code, especially if they're functionally necessary in order to make it work on a particular machine, fall under the scenes a faire doctrine, which allows the free use of stock elements (e.g. in a horror story, the wolves howling at the moon, the remote and spooky castle in Transylvania, the superstitious peasants who know what's going on, etc.).

Creativity for copyright purposes requires the ability to make creative choices. Strip away the ability to choose, and you lose the creativity required for a copyright to subsist.

Only once we've determined what is copyrightable in the first place, and whether the allegedly infringing work is substantively similar, can we then proceed to the question of copying or independent creation.

And if even more people agree with you, you can modify copyright laws, impose price controls, and generally regulate the market. If authors think they're getting a raw deal, they can always wait tables. Of course it's unlikely authors will take their ball and go home; relatively few independent authors make a living solely from writing now -- lots of them have day jobs or rely on outside support. The money's nice to get, no question, but for many authors it is not the only reason to write and often not the most important reason.

It's worthwhile in the long run just to move heavy industry and mining off world. They're just not good things to do in our environment. It would take a long while and a lot of work to make it cost effective, but it's probably better that we do it instead of giving up right off the bat.

(Plus the more that we can make useful things in space, for use in space, without having to launch them from the Earth's surface, the lower the costs will be)

All the best book clubs already were that.

I take that to mean that you are upset that in the US, civil legal services are not provided free of cost to all parties that request them. And that instead, we have a system whereby if a party wants legal representation in a civil matter (which would generally be wise to have), they must find a way to pay for it, which or may not be difficult depending on the specific matter at hand, and the costs may vary considerably from one attorney to another.

I sympathize, but it's difficult to see a good solution to this.

Should we prohibit anyone from hiring legal counsel? Should the government subsidize lawyers in civil practice? Should lawyers be obligated to take any client that requests their services? (Currently, in the US, we don't have to as a general rule) Should we return to trial by combat, and build a series of municipal thunderdomes across the land?

The current system is far from ideal, but I don't know of any solutions that seem to be practical and which don't simply introduce new problems. If you've got an idea, please tell us.

Yes, I'm sure he owned many salves. Balms and ointments too. But the fact that he did some bad things does not invalidate his argument as made in the earlier post. You're actually making an ad hominem argument.

You've yet to say why.

This seems to be a tautology, but it doesn't seem out of place with the "rubbish" argument I was making earlier. I said that people have copyrights only to the extent that they can either personally defend them (which doesn't apply to published works, unless you start killing people) or can convince others to respect them and help in their defense. That some people might want to be paid before helping to defend them fits right in.

I have a 360 and it's offline only. I have no interest in online multiplayer games or anything else that a paid account offers. Coop split screen is okay, if the screen is big enough, but that's it.

Well, I'm a lawyer, I've taken a number of courses concerning copyright law (as well as the usual 1L property class), I've got an LL.M (a law master's degree) in IP, and I specialize in copyright and trademark law.

I think I have some idea of what I'm talking about.

As you seem to think otherwise, perhaps you'll enlighten me as to these things in at least as much detail as I have given in my earlier post.

Yes; that's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. There are arbitrary rules which are enforced. Sometimes you can do what you want by working within the rules (eg buying and selling used copies without permission from or payment to copyright holders -- all legal as per 17 USC 109), sometimes you can change the rules (eg unlawfully making copies of certain sound recordings, whilst following the odd but usable rules in 17 USC 1008 and getting away with it, even in cases where you wouldn't've gotten away with it prior), and sometimes you just have enough force at your disposal that you can ignore the old rules and impose your own (eg the US having an official policy of piracy of foreign works for about a century).

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with this quote from former President Thomas Jefferson: