I can't believe no one here has addressed the simple fact that this seizure only happens with respect to property used to commit CRIMINAL copyright infringement. http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506

First, it's very difficult to prove criminal copyright infringement (that whole "beyond reasonable doubt" standard).

The people prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement are those who have WILLFULLY done copyright infringement for commercial advantage, who do $1,000 worth of distribution/reproduction of copyrighted material, or leaking a soon-to-be-published work before it comes out.

The people targeted by this law are the hard core pirates Cory and his ilk constantly say OUGHT TO BE the ones the government targets.

Perhaps it's my Buddhist nature or my Asian background, but I've always thought OGC was a monk praying with one hand, not someone fapping.

@#2:

Bugs,

One reason for opposing software patents which I think is a valid and logical opposition is as follows. According to the US Constitution, the raison d'etre of patents is to promote "the useful . . . [s]ciences."

A patent does something for its creator (gives them a temporarily monopoly) while doing something to society (restricting its freedom). This temporary monopoly (monopolies are something US economic policy is against, so they are abhorrent unless balanced by benefits to society) is 20 years long, which is more than a lifetime in software development.

The length of the term is too long for software (for other inventions, 20 years might be fair, but 20 years ago we were using 5 1/4" floppies, dreaming of 1MB hard drives).

We may also look at the costs/benefits to society of software patents. Patents typically benefit society as they incentivize otherwise cost-prohibitive investment on the part of businesses, with the promise that they will get protection IF they disclose to the public how they accomplish their invention (in the form of the patent application).

The costs are monumental, and I'm sure that a Boing Boing reader doesn't need to be refreshed on these. The costs are similar to the costs to society of any patent issuing, except that perhaps the costs here are more egregious simply because software moves so fast and 20 years is similar to, say, a 100-year patent in industrial machinery.

The "Boing Boing line" or ("Cory Doctorow line"?) on software patents is that there should be none. We should inquire as to how the cost/benefit analysis would change. Clearly the aforementioned costs to society if there were no patents would go away.

Would the benefits? The question is two-fold: (1) do software developers NEED a patent incentive to develop new computer technology, and (2) would the technology become publicly accessible without the incentive to publish as required in patent applications?

I think the answer to (1) is no. Because software moves so quickly, and it's relatively easy to develop new techniques compared to the material costs of industrial design and patents, developers don't need the defense of patent monopoly. By the time their competitors ripped off their products, we'd be using even better technology, and the original developer will presumably have gotten a jump on that and will have already taken advantage of his other development to a sufficient extent.

I think the answer to (2) is no as well. We constantly hear of cases in which multiple people are rediscovering things that are already patented (submarine patents, anyone?). My experience is that we don't need public disclosure of a company's software because others will be (typically) able to trivially invent the same thing.

So we come down to whether software patents actually perform their constitutional mandate of "promot[ing] the useful . . . [s]ciences." I think my brief analysis at the very least provides an argument that no, software patents do not promote software progress.

@#7 Peacerant:

She said yes. If you'll read the second-to-last claim:
"In the ideal situation where Ellie accepts the diamond ring, Ryan should sign the patent application and deposit the patent application with the United States Postal Service."

His filing the patent application was contingent upon her saying yes. Seeing as how he filed the application, she must have said yes.

Also, I'm a huge IP dork for reading the entire application. Jiminy Schneikies, it's awesome.

@Takuan (22)

I wish I shared your optimism.

@THE WURST

Oh, come on. First of all, it seems an easy enough leap from "normal people remaking films" (which happens all the time already) to "sharing those films with others."

I haven't seen Be Kind Rewind yet, but my understanding is that the protagonists are /forced/ to distribute the films to the one remaining patron of the store. The Amanda Show vid you provided shows some sort of quasi-Eastern European video outfit pawning their videos off as the real things at first and then finally declaring that theirs are superior.

The similarity between BKR and the Amanda Show sketch seems to be nothing more than "video store rents out poorly-made knockoffs."

Indeed, in BKR, the renters enjoy the knockoffs a lot, while in the Amanda Show, the viewers are pretty pissed.

@Yclipse

Yes, but it's a start. As it stands now, this archive has no hope of surpassing Westlaw or Lexis in usefulness. Those databases have paid lawyers who pore over every case and create summaries of important points of law decided by certain paragraphs within thousands of cases a month.

However, this archive is great because legal citation specifies where in a document certain legal precedent may be found. If all federal appellate cases are open and free from one centralized location, judges and lawyers (and Harvard Bluebook writers/editors) might make the transition to permitting (and hopefully requiring, eventually) citations to this format instead of a closed-off Westlaw or Lexis format.

As it stands, the Bluebook prefers public domain citation to cases when the case is available only in electronic form. Perhaps one day it will prefer/require case citation in public domain citation always.

Note: Bluebook is the manual of legal citation that has almost complete dominance over the market.

@94: I promise you that if scientists attained the level of power that the Church had in preceding centuries or that politicians/dictators do now, that we'd be seeing scientists commit crimes against humanity in give-or-take the same proportion.

Also, really, you've never heard of Dr. Eduard Wirths? What about the Nazi human experimentation? I'd say those were scientists, albeit horrible human beings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

@#5 Acipolone:
The University of Texas at Austin does not require a loyalty oath, so presumably no uni or research facility in the entire UT System requires one.

I worked for the College of Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (the /other/ IT, heh), and never heard of such a thing.

@#30:

A bar is not as private as a house. It's more a quasi-public place. For example, you have a legal right to ban black people from entering your house.

However, a bar owner cannot legally ban black people from his bar. It's illegal (a violation of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ("Outlawed discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce; exempted private clubs without defining the term 'private.' from Wikipedia)).

The aforementioned private clubs are like the invite-only country clubs that require a unanimous approval of existing members before a person is allowed to join.

Maybe I'm just inexperienced, but I can't think of any song/genre where isolated vocal tracks would NOT suck except for opera and other performance styles where the emphasis is on the voice as opposed to the music as a whole.

Video is down.

Davin and Bazilisk: Yes, this was posted by Boing Boing already: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/12/preschoolers-asked-w.html

The best part is that it was posted by Mark both times ;)

May 12, 2007 and February 8, 2008.

I really wish /. would do this.

The language is Korean. I've seen the diagram/article in Japanese originally, a year or two ago.

I wrote an ID3 library in Python that handles practically every tag that is in the ID3 specification(s), versions 2, 3, and almost all of 4.

If I was wont to download some silly MP3 and pay money for it, I'd figure out the problem. However, as I refuse to spend my money on degraded-quality products that cost the same amount as better quality at a B&M, I cannot.

I bought one of these when the book was released, and I got another for Christmas that I'm regifting to my brother.

The comic is hilarious, and there's a few unreleased comics in there as well. It's up on my shelf with my collection of Penny Arcades, Peanuts, and trade paperbacks.

#5,

I'm quite sure you meant "rendition" (here a transfer of a person to another country, e.g. from the US to Syria--see Arar v. Ashcroft) and not "redaction" (which, in the present context, is the act of censoring information before releasing documents to the public).

I'm going to get a copy for myself and one for my little sister, who just turned 13. She doesn't like reading too much, but I'm hoping I can turn her to our side (of reading and resistance)!

That was really funny. The writers better be careful, or they're going to obviate a need for real TV if they keep this e-hilarity up!

I take issue with at least one on the list: Lonelygirl15. I literally know ZERO people who have ever seen this. I've never heard anyone talk about it in real life, and in my net life, excluding Boing Boing, I've never heard more than a passing reference (e.g., on TWiT).

Dancing Baby is easily more important, and I suspect Lonelygirl15 is only on the list because it/she/they won a Webby.

How Diggnation or any of the other frontrunner video podcasts (weren't there frontrunners years ago (vlogging, anyone?)) didn't make the list, but Lonelygirl15 did is beyond me? Ridonkulous.

L.B. Jeffries: BB rule 18 is for electronic and internet resources, no?

Also, Thomas Kemp, I'm working off memory of the Bluebook right now (I should know it, as I edit for a journal currently), and I think that it's acceptable to cite to public domain sources (but I'm not sure about court cases since I'm not a lawyer yet).

I think it's a shame that government-related records must cite to proprietary resources when there are non-proprietary resources easily available. It would be nice if we got some sort of courtcases.gov domain that hosted all these, and then citation to the electronic PDFs could be the official citation method.

But I bet West wouldn't like that, nor would their lobbyists (I assume they have them).

I'm pretty confident that poster is a ripoff of a pic I've seen floating around certain websites for a couple years that has a picture of a bunch of peppers with a headline that says, "LOOK AT THESE PEPPERS Oh yeah, we've got motherfucking peppers. Goddamn green ones, and fucking yellow ones, and . . ."
Here's a link: http://www.anotherchan.org/src/1175857436444.jpg

Time to go through the big four of IP law: it's clearly not patented info, nor is it trademarked. The easiest way to dismiss these two is that the info has not been registered with the Patent and Trademark Office.

You cannot copyright facts, so it is not copyrightable.

Now we come to trade secrets. We haven't covered them in my Intro to IP Law class, but I'm an editor on the IP law journal at my university, so I've seen a bit about trade secrets there.

I think that the person who would get in trouble for revealing trade secrets would be whoever gave the website the info, not the website itself. The person guilty of "misappropriation" of trade secrets is whoever illegally acquires the information (i.e., through industrial espionage).

It is likely that the leaker is a Walmart employee (or an employee of the company Walmart contracts out to in order to print their ads). This person would be bound be an NDA perhaps, but he would be the one subject to punishment for misappropriating the info.

If the person then tells a website, the website /legally/ acquired the info and therefore is not guilty of misappropriation.

This act is probably a combination of overenforcement of IP rights and Walmart's attempt to show they are trying to preserve secrets (a prerequisite to enforcing trade secrets is the ability to show reasonable attempts to maintain secrecy through NDAs and other acts).

#26: I agree with you. We have real-world computer hardware that uses this principle at all times, and it seems to have worked fine for decades.

The problem seems to come from someone misunderstanding the solution (something about how the fact that "0 is an even number" makes the solution incomplete, which is a mistake).

Couple of things. #1 is that, despite this tremendous gaffe, she still placed high enough to have the highest placement of any Miss SC since 1998 I think.

#2 - I have a feeling that her coach (as all these pageant girls have) told her to make sure to mention Iraq and Afghanistan in her answers to sound relevant. No idea where the hell "South Africa" came from, though.

I think that is actually Tetris versus Pentris, ¿verdad?