saulgoode 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (351) comment rss

  • On the post: Awesome Stuff: One Last Chance To Join With Thousands Of Others To Help Limit The Influence Of Money In Politics

    saulgoode ( profile ), 05 Jul, 2014 @ 03:12am

    Re: If we fail

    Even if the effort were to fail in getting the movement's candidates elected, the campaign may still be a success in forcing members of congress to commit to a stance for or against the issue of campaign finance reform.

  • On the post: One-Percent Authors Want To End Destructive Conflict, Bring Order to the Galaxy

    saulgoode ( profile ), 05 Jul, 2014 @ 12:36am

    Re: Thanks for all the Thoughts

    In response to various “Amazon has no real choice but to remove the pre-order buttons” — on this I don’t agree. ... But I also believe removing the preorder buttons is, as I said in my post, a deliberate “shot across the bow.”
    I am not familiar with Amazon bookselling practices but if they were to include a pre-order option, would that not have to specify a set price? If so, how should that price be determined?

  • On the post: EU Publishers Present Their 'Vision' For Copyright: A Permission-Based Internet Where Licensing Is Required For Everything

    saulgoode ( profile ), 02 Jul, 2014 @ 06:35am

    I agree with the part about "ubiquitous data standards, to identify works and those who have rights in those works"; however, I would word it as 'all works seeking copyright protection need to be registered and have an archival copy submitted to the copyright office'.

  • On the post: Supreme Court Uses The Bizarre 'Looks Like A Cable Duck' Test To Outlaw Aereo

    saulgoode ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2014 @ 07:58pm

    Re: Re:

    Can you think of any other areas where it is illegal to pay someone to do something for you that you could legally do yourself?
    Yes, but it's not really appropriate to mention it in polite company.

  • On the post: UK Home Secretary: UK Isn't A Surveillance State… And I'd Give You Proof, But You Might All Die Because Of It

    saulgoode ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2014 @ 07:53pm

    Re: A carefully-worded non-denial

    I was thinking the dodge was that they weren't "exploiting a technical loophole", they were just out-and-out ignoring the law.

  • On the post: The NYPD Apparently Doesn't Have Any Rules Governing Its In-House Classification Of Documents

    saulgoode ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2014 @ 07:19pm

    The NYPD may have some actual classification guidelines, but there's no way anyone's accessing them without getting a court involved.
    So they have guidelines, but nobody is following them because nobody knows what they are.

  • On the post: FAA Says Drones May Be Used For Fun… But Not For Profit

    saulgoode ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2014 @ 06:02am

    Re: Taking 'hobby gardening' to a whole new level...

    Who plants enough crops that they need a drone to be able to tell what sections need more water, but aren't involved in a 'commercial farming operation'?
    Tommy Chong?

  • On the post: Supreme Court Rejects Software Patents On Performing Generic Functions; Pretends That Lots Of Other Software Must Be Patentable

    saulgoode ( profile ), 20 Jun, 2014 @ 10:08am

    Re: Re:

    Only abstract ideas can't be patented. Those concrete ideas constructed from physical materials are still candidates.

    /sarc

  • On the post: Supreme Court Rejects Software Patents On Performing Generic Functions; Pretends That Lots Of Other Software Must Be Patentable

    saulgoode ( profile ), 19 Jun, 2014 @ 02:41pm

    Re: Re: Re: Poorly written article

    This article promotes the position that software does no more than require a generic computer to perform generic computer functions.
    Can you provide an example where such is not the case?

  • On the post: Tom Wheeler: 'I'm Not A Dingo.' John Oliver: 'Prove It!'

    saulgoode ( profile ), 16 Jun, 2014 @ 11:21pm

    Re: credibility

    Your observation would carry more weight if he were running for office or was an industry lobbyist; however, since he's the host of a comedy show...

  • On the post: NSA Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny It Uses The Phrases It Used On A Leaked Slide

    saulgoode ( profile ), 16 Jun, 2014 @ 02:18pm

    Let he who is without sin...

    We have determined that the fact of the existence or nonexistence of the materials you request is a currently and properly classified matter...
    So when Congressman Mike Rogers denied the existence of these programs last July, he was actually revealing classified information concerning matters of national security. Further, when he admitted the existence of these NSA programs last August (after Glenn Greenwald released documents detailing their makeup), he similarly engaged in revealing classified information.

  • On the post: Glenn Beck Claims Watch Dogs Is Teaching Children How To Hack The Public For Realz

    saulgoode ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2014 @ 06:46am

    Get off of my lawn!

    And who do you think Mr Beck turns to when he needs to find out how to access his email, print a document for his producer, or take a photo with his phone? Dollars to dumplings it's his son.

    Defying all logic, these darn kids somehow seem to be learning something from these infernal gadgets beyond how to plan mass killing sprees -- they may even know of a means to get around the insuperable problem of searching an ebook for a particular passage without the benefit of "tactile memory".

  • On the post: Can Senator Leahy Actually Get Anything Done To Help With Civil Liberties And Innovation?

    saulgoode ( profile ), 28 May, 2014 @ 12:56pm

    Of late, it seems that Congressional power is more a matter of being able to prevent things from getting done than actually being able to do anything.

  • On the post: Cisco Goes Straight To The President To Complain About The NSA Intercepting Its Hardware

    saulgoode ( profile ), 19 May, 2014 @ 09:28am

    Re:

    Not just pissing and moaning, but actually bringing indictments.

    http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/19/us-chinese-military-officials-cyber-espionage

  • On the post: Lessig's Anti-SuperPAC SuperPAC Raises First $1 Million In Just 12 Days

    saulgoode ( profile ), 15 May, 2014 @ 10:32pm

    Re: Money...Politics...Oil...Water

    It fails on a misdirected objective. That misdirected objective is 'competing with 'Citizens United' style money' vs. removing money from the campaign trail. The former is nice, the later is necessary.
    The whole point of this exercise is that candidates will only receive this Mayday SuperPAC funding if they agree to work towards "removing money from the campaign trail".

  • On the post: Why Making APIs Copyrightable Is Bad News For Innovation

    saulgoode ( profile ), 15 May, 2014 @ 07:56pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Begging the question

    That's exactly what they did. Their implementation is a "clean room" implementation.
    Actually, the trial testimony was quite unclear about the mechanism that resulted in the declarations of the 37 APIs being "word-for-word, symbol-by-symbol" the same (according to Google's witness). You may be correct that Google achieved this through reverse engineering but I don't recall seeing this either claimed or substantiated (the amicus brief from Professor Ralph Oman, former Registrar of Copyrights, asserted that Google had not reverse engineered the API declarations).

    I haven't read it (yet), but when you're making an operating system call, you are making a call to the operating system's API. If an API is copyrightable, then so are those system calls. That works against your argument, if I understand it correctly.
    I would not say that by the mere fact of an interface being an "operating system call", it does not obtain copyright protection; it would depend upon whether that interface is to things that were original, creative choices made by the operating system programmers.

    For example, if displaying the letter "A" on the screen is achieved by moving the number "65" to memory location 0x4e00 then the system call is derived from the non-copyrighted hardware. However, if the OS call comprises passing a complex specified data structure to be inserted into another data structure and manipulating a third data structure for scheduling a particular operation upon the passed data, then the definition and organization of all of those various elements were not dictated by the need to interface with non-copyrighted hardware, but by the desire to avail oneself of the copyrightable creative choices of the OS designer.

    Note that I am not saying that one should not be able to make such calls, but this is not owing to the lack of copyrightability of the API. Most commonly one is licensed to make such calls but even if they are not, there is still a strong case to be made for Fair Use.

  • On the post: Automattic (WordPress) States Explicitly That It Won't Claim Copyright Over Its APIs

    saulgoode ( profile ), 15 May, 2014 @ 03:23am

    And yet Section 3 of their Terms of Use begins with the sentence:

    "The Automattic APIs are subject to certain intellectual property rights, including trademarks, copyrights in the US and other countries."

  • On the post: Why Making APIs Copyrightable Is Bad News For Innovation

    saulgoode ( profile ), 13 May, 2014 @ 06:48pm

    Re: Re: Begging the question

    My argument is not premised upon a resume or bibliography, but on what was tried in the alleged precedents.

    The copyright issue in Sega v Accolade concerned whether the copying performed during reverse engineering should be considered Fair Use. In Oracle v Google, Google did not reverse engineer Java but instead worked from the prodigious documentation available.

    In CA v Altai, the court's analysis first removed the elements of the copied program that were either in the public domain, or dictated by external factors such as operating system calls, and then deciding there was no organizational left afterward worth protection. (When designing a programming language from scratch, as in the case of Java, there are far fewer external factors to dictate the structure required to accomplish a particular task.)

    Lotus v Borland was admittedly about copyrightability of an interface and might apply, but it took place in the 1st District and not binding to a 9th Circuit appeal*.

    There are many reasons why one may decide that Google did not misappropriate Java's "structure, sequence, and organization" -- without resorting to the conclusion that there is no such SS&O original to the APIs at issue, or to APIs in general.

    Personally I think that everyone involved in this case has made mistakes and/or misbehaved. Sun should have more precisely defined what they felt was protected, Google should have GPLed their code (once OpenJDK was announced), Oracle should have sought cooperation rather than litigation (there actions have fairly well torpedoed Java's future), and the lawyers have been arguing all the wrong issues.

    The biggest culprits, though, are the legislators in Congress who have enacted such an untenable copyright regime that it provides no certainty as to what acts are permitted or prohibited, leaves well-intentioned businesses and people at risk of suffering debilitating penalties, and is doomed to waste further billions of dollars in litigation, clogging up the courts, with no sign of any attempt at correcting it.


    "Judge Posner had nothing to do with this case."

    You are correct. I misspoke. I should have said Judge Alsup. And to be precise, in his decision Judge Alsup did not rule that APIs were generally not copyrightable, merely that the Java APIs at issue in this case were not.


    * Though tried by the CAFC, they were compelled to judge the case as though it'd been appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

  • On the post: Why Making APIs Copyrightable Is Bad News For Innovation

    saulgoode ( profile ), 13 May, 2014 @ 03:48pm

    Begging the question

    Neither Sacha Labourey nor the EFF discuss the legal issues of copyright in APIs. They merely support the beneficial nature of not needing to seek permission for interoperable and competitive products -- ignoring that the Fair Use doctrine is the traditional means of addressing such concern (not to mention competition in the marketplace favoring interoperable solutions).

    Tim Lee misrepresents Samba as duplicating the Windows file-sharing system, ignoring that SMB was developed mainly by IBM with some assistance from Microsoft, Intel, and 3com. An attempt by Microsoft to sue the Samba project would have likely led to anti-trust charges (and indeed Microsoft was forced to provide documentation and licensing to Samba because of anti-trust litigation). He is also mistaken in suggesting that copyright liability might occur for "new code from scratch", should it happen to be similar enough. Copyright does not work that way; independent development which might result in identical works is never infringing.

    Jonathan Band is mistaken about the case precendents (the U.S. cases, anyway) examined by the CAFC in that those cases involved Fair Use defenses, and did not address whether APIs obtained copyright protection in the first instance. An issue that was never tried shouldn't qualify as precedent in later litigation.

    The CAFC ruled very narrowly on Judge Posner's decision that the Java APIs did not qualify -- as a matter of law -- for copyright protection. It was entirely appropriate for them not to rule on the factors of Fair Use and copyright abuse, which are yet to be decided.

  • On the post: The Bizarro, Fact-free World Of Copyright Policymaking

    saulgoode ( profile ), 08 May, 2014 @ 10:42am

    For all the sophisticated analysis by economics, economic historians, law-and-economists and lawyers, we still cannot say with any conviction that in general IP law stimulates creativity or promotes innovation, though it may contribute to the process of communication between producers and consumers.
    And it is precisely this "process of communication" that has had its technological costs practically eliminated over the last quarter century or so. In other words, the contribution being made by IP law has been diminished to near zero levels, despite the law being expanded to ridiculous levels.

Next >>