Take care.

The idea is quite simple: I steal your car, you don’t have a car. I have a car, you don’t. Same thing with your 20-dollar bill.

Stealing your car is 100% stealing and 100% wrong. So “stealing is wrong.” is pretty easy in this case.

Even Jean Valjean deprives the baker of selling his loaf of bread by stealing it. But we’ve increasingly found it hard to say that “stealing is wrong” in this case.

We have another case here: If you lend your copy of a game to a friend, and he makes a copy. He didn’t steal from you–as he would if he simply refused to give it back. The software company is the injured party. They laid a lot of money out to develop this product, which they hope to recover through sales. Your friend deprived them of the use of property in selling it to your friend–who evidently needs it.

You may both agree that the company charges too much, but then again, that is the result of piracy. They know that not everybody who uses this software would have purchased it legally. Therefore, they charge their legal customers to make up for that shrinkage.

A lot of people have a lesser problem with this “stealing” but it still is unethical, no doubt. Metallica was popularly reviled for thinking that everybody should pay to own their music.

As we get further and further away from outright theft, we get into areas where calling it “stealing” is a bit overwrought and probably would not be maintained by the same people in similar conditions.

Imagine if oil companies, who pay a good sum of money to produce yearly brochures could copyright this information so that journalist can only use the information compiled and presented by the company in ways approved by the company. In other words, their investors can know that they had record profits last year, but the public couldn’t unless they could agree what the discloser “stood for”.

The video is supposed to represent fact, unless the professors at Harvard are willing to admit that they fudged a lot of stuff, the stodgy propping and whining comes off as narrow stipulation rather than an indication of a lack of ethics.

There also is an issue whether or not any tax dollars went into funding this video–as it would be in many cases of scientific research. If such a thing could be found, appropriating funds from the public in order to create your own “property” where you can act as a miniature martinet is in some sense preventing the public from use of the proceeds of their money, i.e. “stealing”.

Premise was denied permission to use it (at least I think they were denied)

What do you mean, you “think they were denied”? We don’t know whether any of the parties ever offered or requested payment for the video or permission to use the video for free.

From my point of view Harvard is quite possibly guilty of actionable discrimination. It appears to me they give permission (explicit or implicit) to anyone for educational use, or even for-profit use as in YouTube, free of charge so long as the user and the audience are sufficiently non-secular.

We have not heard about any attempt by Harvard to prevent use of the “Inner Life” video in a specific instance. All we have is the following notice posted on Harvard’s “high-speed” and “super-speed” versions of the video:

For educational purposes only.

The use, duplication, or distribution of this material for any commercial purpose is strictly prohibited.

from –
http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html

You are just jumping to conclusions, Dave.

So at a guess, they don’t think anything they did in the animation is worth protecting with a patent.

No that isn’t true. Unless they are patented they cannot meaningfully be stolen. The point of a patent is to declare and idea/invention as something you want to be considered property.

I suppose I they could appeal to trade secret law or something, but that would only cover the techniques used. A different technique to visualize the same result would not be covered.

If XIVIO didn’t patent their algorithm then there is nothing to be stolen because no property claim exists on it. Copyright is automatic, but that applies to the original animation, you have to apply for patents.

FYI, I gave some corrective facts; which still stand.

JJC and JS, as well as DS etc, more than adequately rebut the inference you invite, i.e. that WD was trying to make money by stealing Harvard’s intellectual property.

The evidence in his statement, unrefuted on the merits, is that he made fair use, but waived his exercise of that right to prevent further slander. Especially as he had alternative — though less stunning — footage. [He has good enough -- and independently produced -- footage now, though . . .]

As a fair comment, I observe that it is very hard to resist the obvious inference that slander in service of suppression of a vivid presentation of unwelcome truth (i.e. outside of the partyline-controlled materialist interpretation) of just how intricately complex and carefully organised the cell is is what the accusations against him plainly amount to. [BTW, I found a voiced over presentation at Youtube just the other day; stunning!]

Plato’s cave games, in short . . .

Step into the sunshine, MS!

GEM of TKI

They were just mirroring our content. ALL of our content. Without modification of any kind. XVIVO doesn’t own the copyright to the video in any case. Harvard does.

Dr. Dembski’s particular educational use of XVIVO’s video was precisely the kind of exemption that the Fair Use doctrine was (dare I say) designed for: to protect educators from unapproving copyright holders.

Come on folks, this isn’t rocket surgery.

I doubt that graciously acceeding to XVIVO’s C+D letter in any way waived his fair-use rights, should he decide he wants to use it again. Which of course, he won’t, since he’s got a brand-new better one he to use!

Can’t wait to see the numbers from the first weekend!

To address this I am going to post a copyright message at the bottom of our webpage saying that all content here is copyright and may not be reproduced without permission.
[...]
Several websites not under our control have mirrored our content without our permission. We are a blog with strictly enforced moderation rules for commenters. These other websites are mirroring our content so that they may comment on it without moderation.

And isn’t Bolinsky addressing Dr. Dembski like you addressed Dr. Elseberry?

Wesley, I know this will reach you. You are hereby explicitely put on notice that BUUD is illegally republishing our content which is protected by implicit copyright already and your actions have caused substantial real damages to uncommondescent.com, its owners, and content contributors. You will shut down BUUD immediately to ameliorate these damages.