AJ 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (57) comment rss

  • On the post: When Innovation Meets the Old Guard

    AJ ( profile ), 06 Aug, 2011 @ 08:38am

    Timetabling clashes?

    At my (non-US) high school creating the timetable for the whole school was a highly complicated process. Teachers and students all moved between different class-rooms for different subjects at different times each day, so I may have had Maths at 9.15 on Monday mornings, but on Tuesdays it was at 3.30, and the other year-groups (and even the other classes in my year-group) took Maths at completely different times. As a 3rd-year it wouldn't have been possible for me to take 5th-year physics because the 3rd-year physics lesson times didn't all match up with the 5th-year times.

    I'm not sure how you get round that kind of problem ? Hermione Granger managed it using the time-turner that let her go backwards in time, but they're rather hard to find IRL.

  • On the post: Photographer David Slater Claims That Because He Thought Monkeys Might Take Pictures, Copyright Is His

    AJ ( profile ), 15 Jul, 2011 @ 03:46pm

    Re: Taking Pictures in a Zoo.

    Note: The British Commonwealth hasn't existed since 1949, when it was renamed the Commonwealth of Nations. Try to keep up with the times old chap!

  • On the post: Get Accused Of Copyright Infringement Under New Five Strikes Plan? It'll Cost You To Challenge

    AJ ( profile ), 07 Jul, 2011 @ 01:45pm

    5 or 6?

    Why is Ars Technica calling this a "six strikes" plan?

  • On the post: Should Young People Have Their Votes Count More?

    AJ ( profile ), 17 May, 2011 @ 08:53am

    It will cost more

    Apart from the more complicated vote couting, if you disenfranchise the older (retired) members of the population they aren't going to be as interested in running the polling stations. The election judges at many US polling stations are retired people who get paid very little for the very long hours they have to work on a election day. This idea would reduce their willingness to give back to society in that particular way, thus the cost of elections will go up as it would probably become necessary to increase the pay to attract enough judges.

  • On the post: As Expected, Google's Changes Are Bleeding Demand Media & Other Content Farms

    AJ ( profile ), 28 Apr, 2011 @ 09:04am

    Effect on Techdirt?

    So has Techdirt improved in the search rankings since the Google change? I do remember Mike talking about how there were other sites copying content from here that Google ranked higher, has this now stopped?

  • On the post: University Newspaper Figures Out How To Get Around Administration's Censorship Orders

    AJ ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2011 @ 03:32pm

    Real Life?

    It's not teaching these students journalism at all. It's teaching them about a paranoid administration that wants to hide from the truth.

    On the other hand though, isn't that teaching them about the real world? The students do seem to be getting round some of the road-blocks ? if they hadn't, this story wouldn't be here at all...

  • On the post: New Program Makes It Even Easier To Hide & Access Information In Flickr Photos

    AJ ( profile ), 17 Aug, 2010 @ 08:23am

    Could still be dangerous if the steganography is detectable

    If a regime decides to continue to allow Flickr despite this, it sounds like they could use Collage themselves to detect and decode the hidden material. Once they know which pictures contain censored information they log any downloads of those images against the user's IP address and use that as information about who in their own population is reading it. I would want the program to need the right key to even be able to detect that there is hidden material present before I used something like this.

  • On the post: Century-Old Dictionary Error Shows That 'Professionally' Edited Reference Books Make Errors Too

    AJ ( profile ), 12 May, 2010 @ 09:23am

    Re: Vacuum

    There has to be a connection with atmospheric pressure, the professor is not completely right. A siphon cannot work if the hump is significantly larger than the equivalent height of the atmospheric pressure for the liquid, i.e. about 34 feet for water at 1 atm, 30 inches for mercury. It is the pressure of the atmosphere that is pushing the water up the pipe, although gravity does pull it down the lower side causing the liquid to flow. If you try to make the hump any bigger than that height, you'll get a void (vacuum) forming at the top of the hump and the flow will stop.

    The Wikipedia entry for Atmospheric Pressure says "This is also the maximum height to which a column of water can be drawn up by suction" which is exactly what a siphon does, it uses gravity to generate suction that pulls the liquid over the hump. Surface tension might have some effect on the maximum height of the hump, but it couldn't be very big and would depend on the diameter of the pipe.

  • On the post: Why We Need Better Metrics For Measuring User-Generated Content

    AJ ( profile ), 06 Apr, 2010 @ 08:32am

    View Page Source?

    Do any of the mobile browsers support a View Source option? I'm guessing not, as that would only be needed by people wanting to use the devices for creative purposes; the functionality is irrelevant for consumptive users. This supports Tim Wu's concerns to a small extent.

  • On the post: FTC Finally Forces FreeCreditReport.com To Be Honest In Its Advertising

    AJ ( profile ), 03 Mar, 2010 @ 01:15pm

    Why wasn't it a .gov address?

    The FTC really didn't think this through when they set up the site in the first place; if they has used a .gov address instead it would have made it much easier for people to recognize when they're using the right address.

  • On the post: Movie Star Claims Heathrow Airport Staff Printed Out, Circulated, His Naked Body Images

    AJ ( profile ), 10 Feb, 2010 @ 02:58pm

    US vs. UK?

    If it was Homeland Security who claimed that the screener would be at a remote location, that promise can only apply to machines installed at US airports; the TSA have no jurisdiction over Heathrow Airport. The British have their own rules, which include that they can't use the scanners on children since the resulting images would then be classified as child pornography.

  • On the post: If A Video Is Filmed By Chimps… Who Owns The Copyright?

    AJ ( profile ), 26 Jan, 2010 @ 09:53pm

    There might be related precedent ...

    I'm no lawyer and wouldn't know how to start searching for such things, but I suspect the legal status of works made by owned animals might be similar to that of works created by owned people, meaning by slaves. Of course there may never have been any such cases, but if there were they might give some guidance...

  • On the post: Are The Record Labels Using Bluebeat's Bogus Copyright Defense To Avoid Having To Give Copyrights Back To Artists?

    AJ ( profile ), 19 Nov, 2009 @ 10:55am

    What does "remastering" actually mean?

    If remastering means to going back to the original studio multi-track recordings (digitizing as necessary) and re-mixing them, I could see that as being a different kind of thing (and somewhat more worthy of a new copyright for a record company which actually does that) than just re-encoding the digital audio data which is what it sounds like Bluebeat were trying to do. As a result I'm highly skeptical that a court would see these two issues as the same (but IANAL so what do I know).

  • On the post: Trent Reznor Explains What A Musician Needs To Do To Be Successful These Days

    AJ ( profile ), 09 Jul, 2009 @ 03:40pm

    What if it's not our song to give away?

    I sing in a professional choir; while we do perform music composed by our director, in most cases the stuff we sing is by living composers, whose publishers all charge per-copy royalties to record their songs. We couldn't afford to pay those fees ourselves on copies that we give away for free, so those recordings are not infinite goods. I imagine that any band recording cover songs that are not yet out of copyright would have the same problem, but I've never heard this being discussed.

    I would love to be able to put up a whole bunch of our past performances as MP3s on our website, but I can only do that legally for the limited amount of our output where the compositions are no longer in copyright. Any ideas?

  • On the post: How The Entertainment Industry 'Launders' Policy Pronouncements

    AJ ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2009 @ 08:43am

    <pedantic>
    Surely it's really the evidence that is being laundered; the policies that are being pushed flow "logically" from the incorrect evidence.
    </pedantic>

  • On the post: Swedish ISP Starts Deleting Log Files To Protect Users From IPRED Law

    AJ ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2009 @ 02:26pm

    No, they never created the logs in the first place.

    IIRC the ARS Technica coverage of this story made it clear (they actually talked to Bahnhof) that the ISP never actually logged the information in the first place, and they're not deleting logfiles now. I don't think they've changed what they do at all, they're just bringing this fact to the attention of potential customers who might be interested in their lack of logging.

  • On the post: Rethinking Handing Copyright On To Heirs Beyond Death

    AJ ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2009 @ 09:56am

    Incentives

    The idea that copyrights should die with the author is obviously a bad one, because as others have pointed out it creates an incentive for others to take advantage of that by killing the author. I think most people would agree that such incentives would be a bad thing, and it's actually a disincentive to the author to create new works because with each success their death becomes worth more to those people who would want to exploit it.

    A part of an author's incentives to produce new works may also be to provide for their heirs. An established author who is older or dying would have little or no incentive to create new works if they would be unable to pass on the value of those works to their heirs.

    Therefor the idea that copyrights should not be inheritable is obviously wrong from the perspective of the incentives of authors.

    However, extending copyright terms is completely pointless as far as incentives go if the new terms apply retroactively to works that already exist at the time the law is enacted. Doing so would merely be giving the value of the future public domain lost over to the current owners for no public gain. Any newly enacted terms would apply to any new works and thus provide the increased incentives to create, but the retroactive provision is a pure negative for the public.

    I agree with many that the existing copyright terms are too long, but that's not really the topic here.