h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

May I be the first to offer my heartiest congratulations to jwordsmith on the occasion of her first entry into the Edited Guide.

Well done j!

H.

And I'll be the second! Nice work indeed!

I hope this is the first of many...

J

Congratulations!

Woo-Hoo!

Thanks Hoovooloo, for your support.

by the way, it is possible that if the current raft of american legislation (dmca, etc) don't get challenged, that the technology to do this will become illegal, despite only being used for legal purposes.

Er... which bit of technology?

Unless my memory is fading more than I can remember, the technology involved isn't much more than extremely fancy printers and storage media. Which specific bit of P.O.D. tech is threatened?

H.
Looking at my hard drive and my deskjet and getting worried...

copying any part of an copyrighted work, even a snipet of a book for a book review.

and the legislation is the digital milenium copyright act, and the even more unreasonable successor.

in fact, the successor bill is talking about making it compulsory for any device which has the ability to use for file copying to have to support expensive, closed source copyright id checkers.

Of course this would also make any opensource operating system illegal, along with compliers, interpreters, etc, so it would be illegal to do any programming.

Hmmm, not sure about this, but with POD the author (copyright holder) grants the distributing company a license to distribute the content. The best companies take a non-exclusive licence. Therefore, the permissions should be OK since it is one, central company doing the printing, not the end-user.

Julie

PS Thanks to all who offered congrats. I'm tickled.

where the possibility comes for making this illegal is using the successor legislation, while having the copying permission being expensive.

in thatcase, even authors won't be able to grant permissions, as the certificate for granting permissions could legally be exhorbitantly expensive.

sure the author could grant permissions, but only if they could afford the certificate to allow them to grant permissions.

that is why the whole idea is at risk.

Hmmm, can someone point me in the direction of a discussion about these pieces of legislation and their effects?