Interrupting a 1-week sprint occasionally due to business needs is fine. Doing so on such a regular basis that a member of the development team feels the need to beg for help in a public forum (Slashdot, no less) is indication of a rather large management failure. Blaming schedule slips on the devs after arbitrarily changing direction shows that management has no concern or respect for them.

I know the submitter doesn't want to hear this, but if his description is even remotely accurate, he needs to start looking for another job (yes, it is *always* an option).

Although do remember that you are allowed to copy the original via the copy. The derivative copyright only applies to the portion of the derivative work which is new. Old material that reappears in the derivative work is fair game. So if you could carefully extract only the non-Disney parts from, say, Disney's Cinderella, you'd be fine even though you took that particular route.

In the US fair use is basically a tautology: a fair use is an otherwise infringing use which is fair under the circumstances. Any use might be fair, but not every use will be. There is no rule that all quotes or all educational uses or all time shifting is fair, you see. Each individual use must be analyzed anew and will depend on the circumstances in the case at hand.

So all fan translation and subtitling of movies isn't a fair use because it's too generic. A specific instance of a specific fan translating and subtitling a movie, under just the right circumstances, however, could be fair.

The previous poster was referencing some of those factors, so it seems that be knows more about fair use in the US than you do.

Makes sense to me. The purpose of copyright is twofold: first, to incentivize authors to create and publish works which they otherwise would not have created and published; and also to place those works into the public domain, so that they're the most useful to the public, as fully and quickly as possible.

Remember, what was said was:

Which is to say, copyright has as a goal placing as many works as possible, as quickly and fully as possible, in the public domain, so that they can be mucked about with, without anyone's permission.

Oh, I disagree. Sometimes it's good, but plenty of laws are neither better nor worse than alternatives (including not having the law), and should be chosen according to local preferences, rather than what everyone else is doing.

For copyright there's no need for harmonization at all; let each country do what's good for its own people, and merely coordinate informally to avoid situations where two countries have laws which are so incompatible that an author who wanted a copyright in both has to choose between one or the other.

But will you make the mistake of listening to rms sing the Free Software Song? (Which is apparently public domain, rather than GPLed)

http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html

Slashdot most decidedly believes in project management. In fact, The Slashdot Consensus very fervently believes that project management is too important to be entrusted to project managers; like marketing, sales, management, and pretty much every other non-technical facet of business, project management is doomed to fail unless the technical people are doing it.

We'll call it "Slashdot's Rule of Business": No matter what the task, the only people to which it can be reasonably entrusted are the computer geeks.

So I guess I do have a free speech right to copy works made by other people. Since the expiration of copyright doesn't grant me any rights, but merely removes rights that had been granted to the author, and since it's rather odd to claim that free speech is a right which flows from the state to the people, I guess I must have the same right even as to copyrighted works. Copyright infringes on my right while it subsists, but there doesn't appear to be any other way of making sense of this.

Oh, and BTW, Oliver Twist was never copyrighted in the US; we didn't grant foreign authors copyrights until much later. I just chose those works because the authors hated people copying their work, legally or not.

Let me clarify: a publisher can whip up copies of a book as easily or more easily than a pirate can. Yes, the initial creation of the book is difficult and costly, but the marginal cost of each copy thereafter is not greater for the publisher than the pirate merely due to the state to which technology has advanced. I was never addressing the issue of paying for the labor needed to get the book ready to publish to begin with; those sunk costs are not going away and are not too closely linked to publishing technology. Hell, some authors still write books longhand.

For example, if the cheapest way to print a paper book is to use a huge offset press, publishers likely have an advantage over pirates who will either have to conceal their huge illegal printing operation or use inferior techniques, such as xeroxing books one at a time. OTOH, if xeroxing books one at a time somehow happened to become a cheaper means of printing than anything else, the legitimate publishers would have the offset press hauled away, install a bunch of xerox machines, and still not be behind the curve of the pirates.

That only brings pirates toward technological parity. Legitimate publishers are not prohibited from using the latest tools. It may be difficult for them to figure out how to make money whilst selling books over Bit Torrent or whatever the kids are using these days, but they needn't be shackled to the old ways.