unavoidable

You and the poster below mention Japanese as an example. I counter by saying that Japanese use of Kanji is very different than the Chinese use. I am a native Chinese speaker and have taken Japanese classes, and their vocalization in the language are very different. Japanese places a heavy emphasis on how the characters are pronounced because their language is not purely ideographic; rather they use a hybrid phonetic and ideographic system which forces the reader to vocalize sentences including the Kanji characters.

I posit that if you were a native Chinese speaker, you could skim (or speed read as claimed in the article) without any subvocalization and still understand the given passage.

Proof that you can read without subvocalization are ideographic languages such as Chinese (especially the traditional variety), where the written text and the 'vocalization' are not directly related - it is possible to understand a passage of text based on the relation of the characters to each other and the appearance of characters themselves (e.g. the radicals used and the parts within) without actually knowing how each character is pronounced.

I wonder if the author knows that "Letterpress" is a rather popular iOS game.

"iDevice" seems to be a useful word I hear a lot these days.

What you say is true. But most people also did not foresee the USSR collapse in the early 1990s. At least not with the speed at which it happened.

Even a cursory Google search shows how false your assumptions are. There were many external factors which regular North Korean citizens had no control over. Most accounts of the 'origin' of North Korea involve to some degree the proxy war between USSR and USA in the aftermath of the Japanese invasion in Asia. I doubt very much that "regular" North Koreans had any say in how some foreign governments decided to divide up and control their land. Follow that up with a great deal of propaganda, and you have a massively uninformed (or misinformed) citizenry controlled by the state.

Is it the institutions that cause divisions, or is it the divisions that cause the institutions? I don't think this answer is as clear as you suggest, because a great deal of beliefs and ideologies are passed down by institutions such as schools, which are of course mostly government controlled. Is it merely a historical artifact that the US has so many creationists?

I use Canada as an example because I think it's interesting how two countries that were basically founded by the same people (European settlers, mostly British in the early years) have diverged so greatly in both governance and ideology.

Wow. I was just thinking of making something like this yesterday. Guess great ideas don't last long. I was also interested in seeing how similar terms of services are. I've been working on a paper studying how boilerplate terms seem to be growing more dense over time, and one of the things I've noticed looking at a lot of TOSes is how similar they all are. For example, there are really only two or three variations on the wordings of choice of law clauses, and almost all arbitration clauses look the same. Wonder if you can run a comparison on your database across various TOSes to see how similar they are (a la turnitin for essays).

I have a striking suspicion that the lawyers (or webmasters) are just copying and pasting a lot of these terms from standard repositories or otherwise from other services.

Every time an article like this comes up, someone immediately pops up to say something like "the listed countries aren't multi-ethnic like the USA!"

This is a meme that should die, because it isn't based in any fact, but is mere speculation. A quick look down any statistics for immigration (as other posters have pointed out) will show very little difference between the US and other "Western" countries. The assertion that multiculturalism restricts good governance clearly does not hold up to scrutiny. Canada, for example, compares well to Scandinavian countries on certain metrics (education, economy, formerly healthcare...), and nobody can plausibly argue that Canada is not at least as multi-ethnic as the US.

I should add that substantively, the conclusion that programming languages can't be copyrighted is relatively well supported from past cases. Generally one can't copyright rules to a game or contest, and one can't copyright facts or algorithms. This principle has been extended, at least in the US, to the whole idea that one cannot copyright systems and processes (see §102 of the copyright act).

This is slightly more complicated in the EU because of the Information Directive and the Software Directive, which grants copyright to more portions of software than the common law used to, and also gives copyright to 'intellectual works' (whether this is the same as an 'original work' requirement in the common law world is still up for debate).

Your conclusion is sort of correct, but the devil is in the details.

The reason that the judge says it is only his "provisional view" is that the issue of whether the SAS programming language can be copyrightable was never brought up at the initial trial. The lawyers for the plaintiffs were attempting to amend their claim based on the wording from the European Court of Justice from the same proceedings.

Procedurally, this is what happened: (1) lawyers claimed a bunch of stuff in the first trial mostly about the manuals and the source code and not the underlying language itself; (2) the English court decided on some issues, but had questions about the EU Software Directive which it referred to the CJEU; (3) the CJEU issued a decision that on its face looked like it was not entirely favourable to the plaintiffs; (4) when the case came back to England, the plaintiffs' lawyers tried to add the claim of copyright infringement in the language to the trial.

The judge says at paragraph 26 that the plaintiffs were not entitled to amend their claims on this issue since they didn't raise it before the trial.

Therefore, strictly speaking, everything that this judge says about the copyrightability of programming languages is 'obiter dicta' - that is, it has no binding value because those comments were irrelevant to the ruling. The decision could have been made without those comments. In the common law tradition, obiter is not binding (and it is usually claimed in law schools that obiter is bad form for judges, but they like to talk about it anyway because judges can do whatever they want).

So you are basically correct - the judge decides nothing, and this case does not actually decide whether programming languages are copyrightable (though based on the judge's interpretation, it is his opinion that it is not). In any case, this is a High Court decision, which is pretty low on the hierarchy so even if they did decide so, it would only be a relatively weak precedent.

No, I think you may be confusing some things here. Sometimes judges give juries instructions to ignore a particular part of a case when making findings for another part of the case. This makes it easier to rule on a case when it goes to appeal. For a patent trial, often the judge will instruct the juries to consider the issue of infringement alone, assuming that the underlying patents are valid, and then consider the validity question separately.

So on appeal, the appellate court can overturn a specific finding (i.e. one of the underlying claims are invalid) but not overrule the overall finding (i.e. the infringement finding is still valid because they found that if certain other claims were valid then the defendant did infringe).

This is obviously more complicated in practice because juries are supposed to only decide issues of fact and not issues of law - but in some cases it's difficult to say exactly what is law and what is fact. This is especially so in patent law, where the actual letters patent are supposed to be interpreted in light of the relevant patent legislation, and often turns on interpretation of words (which are questions of law).

This is, by the way, why patent trolls like jury trials. It's easy to bog down processes in these trials and confuse the jury.

As for the Samsumg case, that's complicated by a generally ignorant foreman who seems to have convinced fellow jurors that his interpretation of the law was correct.

Then you have the reason why you haven't received an answer - your question is framed (almost deliberately) to have no answer. Copyright does not exist "in an object". It _is_ a state-enforced statutory right that "exists" in a "work" whether that work is a movie, music, software, book, etc. The "physical medium" you refer to is merely one copy of the "work" that is copyrighted. The work itself is necessarily incorporeal - it is an intellectual creation of somebody, and lies beyond the mere physical expression. You can do whatever you want with the box or medium - you are entitled to do that, except to the extent that you are limited by protection of the "work" that is copyrighted.

Copyright subsists automatically in the 'work' provided it meets the definition in the Copyright Act.

The license itself may be entirely separate from copyright. It can restrict your rights under copyright, or it can grant you more rights (provided that they own it), or it can restrict you from doing things not related to the copyright at all. The license is merely a contract. It's important to know that it's a contract, because there are legal protections and doctrines that apply only to contracts (i.e. the meeting of the minds).

On physical products sometimes it is located on the packaging (i.e. "shrinkwrap" contracts) - last time I opened a Microsoft Office DVD (not that recently) it was still printed on the package. Most software nowadays have their license agreements in the installation procedure, where you click "I Agree". For music/DVDs, sometimes that is less clear (sometimes there is no license at all). If there is no license, you are still bound by copyright law - that is, if you copy it, you're infringing the reproduction right, etc.

This is indeed the 'correct' (or at least more correct) interpretation of what 'property' means in the digital context.

On the other hand, I can't help but wonder whether Hollywood and BigContent is trying to have it both ways. A big part of the problem is that BigContent tried very hard in the 90s and early 2000s to get it into the consumer's mind that intellectual property is analogous to physical or personal property. Remember those ads, like "Don't copy that floppy", or "You wouldn't download a car"? They deliberately (for obvious reasons) tried to make the same analogy.

And now, here they are, finally after more than a decade spent kicking and screaming and suing everyone in sight, are trying to adapt to the business models consumers have been waiting for - and now they come back and claim that "oh, we didn't really mean that this is like personal property at all - we're just giving you a limited license and we can take it away at any time!"

There's a certain degree of cognitive dissonance at work here, and if I was an "average" consumer I'd probably be a little bid confused and a little bit unhappy about the severely limited rights I've been given after all I've been hearing and what I've been used to.

The eBook industry is a good example - the oligopoly of publishers has managed to set the prices for eBooks at virtually the same prices as physical books, and in some cases even more expensive than physical books. Yet, the rights I have with my eBook are far less than with a physical book (recall the Kindle issues and the woman who had her access revoked).

Is this BigContent's new business model? Charge more for less rights? If so, I think the outrage is understandable (if not legally or philosophically well formed).

The Verge had a great summary (as posted above) so I won't go into the actual 'law'. I don't even think the issue is really about what they can or cannot do in the license - Instagram is entitled to write whatever they want in the license agreement, and the original TOS was drafted in a very lawyerly way to basically allow them to do almost anything (advertising-wise) they wanted with your photos anyway.

The real interesting part is that users are willing to make a lot of noise about these license agreements without reading them. I think there's a lot of pent up FUD about license agreements because there are so many of them out there that nobody ever reads any of them, and there's a big appetite out there for somebody, anybody, to clarify these terms for them.

The consumer group-think goes kind of like: "What can Facebook do with my data? I don't know, but I'm sure their lawyers put something in the license agreement that I'm never going to read or understand. Oh, this blog says it's really bad, time to complain loudly!"

I think the result is that there really needs to be an effort on the part of these online service providers to clarify their terms and make human-readable summaries of users' rights/licenses so that everyone understands where they stand contractually.

Just because the text of cases and legislation is easy to digitize does not mean the profession is. Your statement could perhaps be flipped on its head: "coding is easy to analyze with computers especially given the wealth of open source materials to work with, and now has greatly reduced the number of programmers needed." I'm sure you can see the fallacy of that argument.

It is true that the _costs_ of legal research has decreased, since it is now easier and faster to find cases, but that generally does not extend to lawyers, but rather to legal assistants, librarians, paralegals, and whatnot. Law is still an extremely contextual field, and computers are very bad at dealing with realities of multiple complex interacting systems (as laws generally are). I would love to one day see computers spit out answers to legal questions, but as for today, I don't think that a computer could argue a case for me in court.

See the gist of the reply I made to the other commenter. The reason this arises is generally because of the back-and-forth between Parliament and the courts.

When a court gives a restrictive meaning to a given provision, it incentivizes Parliament to introduce more laws to capture the activity they wanted to capture in the first place. This has gone on for decades, and as a result, the British tax laws are a mess. When you have a massive number of provisions trying to capture essentially the same thing, then you are bound to run into inconsistencies, which lead to "loopholes".

The reason it is so "complicated" is the court ruling I mentioned above along with its progeny - narrow interpretations of tax laws (i.e. a strict "letter of the law" interpretation that the UK has followed) necessitates more lines of law in order to achieve a desired result. However the more words and sections in a law, the more complex it becomes, and after a certain point it leads to a great deal of conflicts.

So yes, I think the tax laws need to be better written - but it's very difficult to do so given the historical developments and judicial attitude towards tax.

Courts in the UK have historically had very narrow interpretations of tax laws. The classic example is a House of Lords case called Commissioners of Inland Revenue v. Duke of Westminster, where one of the judges gave this great judgment:

"Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so as that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax. This so-called doctrine of “the substance” seems to me to be nothing more than an attempt to make a man pay notwithstanding that he has so ordered his affairs that the amount of tax sought from him is not legally claimable."

The influence of this case is still strongly felt today in courts, and this leaves the British Parliament with little power to make "strong" tax laws that have no "loopholes".

American courts and laws do far more to assert jurisdiction and prevent tax avoidance, but as we know American tax rates are much lower than most countries.

If the guy has a halfway competent lawyer, that is not what the judge will think. This grossly oversimplifies the exigencies of law enforcement versus the courts. Law enforcement is forced to take down things like exit nodes because they have no other way of tracking down the originators. Whether that will stick in court is an entirely different matter.

What they're lacking is not professional management, but the rule of law.

But this glosses over the undertones of the article - that is, the Obama campaign was able to attract these people precisely because the Democrats were more forward-thinking, more progressive, younger, and more open-minded. Are the Republicans capable of building this thing? Sure - but probably not with a lot of the same talent that has traditionally shared the same progressive views that the Democrats support.

That is not the point of the article. The article is an in-depth exposition of the Obama campaign's tech team, along with how they faced difficulties, how they transformed their own culture to mesh with the traditional political world (and vice versa), as well as the products they ended up building.

Although I would like to see that happen, I think the argument is a big stretch. The constitutional challenge depends on the assertion that there is a free-standing right to access information, even if it is privately produced. Geist and other scholars are of course in favour of this interpretation, but I don't think it has been adopted by courts anywhere yet.

It's also not a copyright claim, but a trademark claim. Different type of lawsuit altogether.

Somewhat related but lost in the cheering from the photographers is that this law also now makes the act of defeating DRM systems illegal (or more precisely, it is copyright infringement simply to get around DRMs or to distribute tools that do so).

I've always wondered - why isn't source code disclosed in a software patent? In most other mechanical inventions or even pharmaceutical ones, the type of disclosure required does include a fair bit of detail - perhaps blueprints of some sort and certainly lots of diagrams and explanations. Wouldn't the software equivalent of that be the source code, rather than, say, screenshots?

I'm not on contract so I don't get my phones subsidized (for this exact reason - I want more choice). I don't need LTE and in any case the carriers in my area charge more for LTE than HSPA+. The value proposition seems very attractive to consumers like me. And I'm sure there are many more out there who find this phone in the "sweet spot" of price vs. features. Price is no gimmick in the free market.

At half the price?