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A “computer program” is a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result.

“Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed.

“Copyright owner”, with respect to any one of the exclusive rights comprised in a copyright, refers to the owner of that particular right.

The screenplay, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, was based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

It is one of the most literate science fiction films, both thematically enfolding the philosophy of religion and moral implications of the increasing human mastery of genetic engineering, within the context of classical Greek drama and its notions of hubris,[39] and draws on Biblical images, such as Noah's flood,[40] and literary sources, such as Frankenstein.[41]

Blade Runner delves into the future implications of technology on the environment and society by reaching into the past using literature, religious symbolism, classical dramatic themes and film noir. This tension between past, present and future is apparent in the retrofitted future of Blade Runner, which is high-tech and gleaming in places but elsewhere decayed and old.

Within a century, it will be possible to scan a human mind and reproduce it inside a machine. Regardless of whether our minds are just very sophisticated analog computers, or whether they have a quantum-mechanical element (as Roger Penrose proposes), we will nonetheless be able to duplicate them artificially.

Already, at the close of the second millennium, a transhumanist movement has begun; Christopher Dewdney is the principal Canadian spokesperson for it. This movement holds that uploading our consciousness into machines is desirable, since that will free us from biological aging and death. On the other hand (a decidedly biological metaphor), there is more to being human than just the networks of synapses in our brains; clearly, much of what we are is tied in intimately with our bodies. We may find that uploaded humans are not happy — indeed, are incapable of happiness or any emotion.

Just as laws today are moving toward recognizing a woman's right to control her body and any separate sentience that may be contained within it, so too will the laws of the future recognize the right of humans to upload their consciousness and then dispose of the original biological versions of themselves; such eliminations will not be seen as suicides or murders, but rather as a natural, perfectly legal step, eliminating a no-longer-needed biological container and preserving the uniqueness of the individual.

transformative nature of the thumbnails Google created, which, by facilitating the public’s ability to search the web for images, serve a different purpose than the original images, which are designed to entertain.

Google does not store the images contained on such third party web pages in its cache.  Rather, all that these cached copies contain are html instructions setting forth the location on the internet where the image can be found

the Copyright Act, unlike the Trademark Act, does not protect a copyright holder against acts that cause consumer confusion.

He took a plane to Florence, Oregon, where the USDA was sponsoring a lengthy series of experiments in using poverty grasses to stabilize and slow down the damaging sand dunes, which could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways."[5] Herbert's article on the dunes, "They Stopped the Moving Sands," was never completed (and only published decades later in an incomplete form in The Road to Dune), but it sparked Herbert's interest in the general subject of ecology and related matters.

The CHOAM corporation is the major underpinning of the Imperial economy, with shares and directorships determining each House's income and financial leverage.

Melange is crucial as it enables space travel, which in turn is monopolized by the Spacing Guild; its Navigators use the spice to safely plot a course for the Guild's Heighliner ships via prescience using "foldspace" technology, which allows instantaneous travel to anywhere in the galaxy.

In May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction barring Google Inc. from displaying thumbnail versions of photographs found on an adult-oriented Web site, reasoning that the Web site owner was unlikely to overcome Google's fair use defense. Perfect 10 Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc., 487 F.3d 701 (9th Cir. 2007).

Jeffrey P. Cunard, of Debevoise & Plimpton, Washington, D.C., > termed secondary liability a “leaping mess,” which he > attributed to an effort on the part of the courts to erode the > Sony-Betamax > prescription for secondary liability, and not have > it apply in a digital era. > In Sony Corp. v. Universal Studios Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984), the U.S. Supreme Court held that if a technology is “capable of substantial noninfringing uses,” the manufacturer of that technology cannot be liable for the infringing acts of users.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios > Inc. v. Grokster Ltd. > , 125 S.Ct. 2764, 33 Med.L.Rptr. 1865 (2005) >

Shortly before his intuition about an atomic bomb, Leo Szilard had been reading The World Set Free by H. G. Wells--a novel about a German invasion of France and the use of atomic bombs in a global war, a novel written in 1913 but set in the 21st century. Wells called his radioactive element Carolinum: "once its degenerative process had been induced, [Carolinum] continued a furious radiation of energy, and nothing could arrest it." In 1913, Wells was already writing about radioactive decay, half-lives, burning cities, even about deforestation, diminishing supplies of coal and oil, and the rush toward bankruptcy. And he inspired Szilard. Wells wrote--and Szilard read--of the final achievement of a world government and the abolition of atomic weapons--the "world set free." "The catastrophe of atomic bombs shook men...," Wells wrote, "out of their old-established habits of thought." And it was H.G. Wells who gave us the phrase, "a war to end all war."

It is a critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society, written in the early years of the Cold War.

Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which ultimately leads to ignorance of total facts.[3]

Anyone caught reading books is, at the minimum, confined in a mental hospital, while the books are taken away and burned; at the maximum, the penalty is a sentence to immediate death. The main books that are not allowed are those, of great and famous works of literature, by many famous writers, such as Dickenson, Poe, Twain, and others.

Dr. Asimov, 65, is a severe critic of Star Wars. "I'm against it, not because I'm a science-fiction writer, and therefore have special knowledge, but because I like to think I'm a sane human being." He believes Star Wars is a dangerous waste of money. "They're talking about spending $33 billion on research related to Star Wars. We're going to withdraw money from needed aspects of developing knowledge in order to set up something that probably won't work and even if it does work, won't do us any good."

Part of the problem with Star Wars is that it will take years to develop. "If I were the Soviet Union, I would have spent all this time trying to work up methods to penetrate the shield," said Asimov, who was born in Russia but grew up in New York. "I have a strong suspicion it would be cheaper to penetrate the shield than to set it up. "And if we're in real danger of a nuclear war now, trying to set up something for the middle of the 21st century isn't going to do us any good. In fact, by filling us full of false confidence, we're not going to make a strong enough effort to prevent war now."

"There are science-fiction writers, notably myself and Arthur C. Clarke, who were anti-Vietnam and are anti-Star Wars," said Asimov. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was born in England and lives in Sri Lanka. "Clarke was howled down once by someone saying as a non-American citizen he had no right to make comments about Star Wars. That's an extremely stupid remark. "If you have no right to decry the policy of a country unless you are a citizen of that country, why the hell is Reagan always yelling about the Soviet Union? Is he a Soviet citizen?"

Wells depicts the Martians firing spacecraft to Earth from a giant space gun, a common representation of space travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bearing similarity to the modern spacecraft propulsion concept of mass drivers.

Military theorists of that era had many speculations of building a "fighting-machine" or "land dreadnought" (as the Royal Navy called this hypothetical machine on which some experiments were made just before the First World War). Wells's concept of the Martian tripods, fast-moving and equipped with Heat-Rays and black smoke, represents an ultimate end to these speculations, although Wells also presents a less fantastical depiction of the armoured fighting vehicle in his short story "The Land Ironclads". [1] [2]

On a different field, the book explicitly suggests that the Martians' anatomy may reflect the far future development of mankind itself — i.e. that with the increasing development of machines, the body is largely discarded and what remains is essentially a brain that "wears" a different (mechanical) body for every need, just as humans wear the clothes appropriate to a particular weather or work.

You buy a CD but can't take it to the gym. The Audio Home Recording Act legalized our right to copy music for personal use -- for example, making a tape of a CD to use in a Walkman. But new copyright legislation makes it a crime to extract music from copy-protected CDs. You pay for cable but you aren't allowed to use your VCR. In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court ruled that making a copy of a TV show was a legal, non-infringing use of broadcast content. But new HDTV standards will make it illegal to copy a digital broadcast without the permission of the TV station. You buy a DVD but you can't watch it the way you want to. It seems obvious that users should have the ability to fast-forward and rewind movies as they see fit. But new copyright laws threaten that right: it is a crime to sell a DVD player that would allow a consumer to fast-forward through the ads at the beginning of a DVD! You own an electronic book, but you can't lend it to your son at college. Your right to lend a physical book is protected by the "first sale doctrine." This law states that purchasers of copyrighted works such as music or books have the right to dispose of the works in any way that they wish: they can sell them, loan them, rent them, or give them away. But new copyright laws criminalize all of those activities for digital content such as electronic books.

people who've "had their property stolen" are a lot more sympathetic in the public imagination than "industrial entities who've had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated", the latter being the more common way of talking about infringement until the ascendancy of "intellectual property" as a term of art.

facts are not copyrightable, so no one can be said to "own" your address, National Insurance Number or the PIN for your ATM card. Nevertheless, these are all things that you have a strong interest in, and that interest can and should be protected by law.

there's plenty of stuff out there that's valuable even though it's not property. For example, my daughter was born on February 3, 2008. She's not my property. But she's worth quite a lot to me.

The protagonists are essentially altruists whose ideals are sometimes only imperfectly applied to the dilemmas presented in the series. The conflicts and political dimensions of Star Trek form allegories for contemporary cultural realities; Star Trek: The Original Series addressed issues of the 1960s,[2] just as later spin-offs have reflected issues of their respective eras. Issues depicted in the various series include war and peace, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, human rights, sexism and feminism, and the role of technology.[3]

The Star Trek franchise is believed to have motivated the design of many current technologies, including the Tablet PC, the PDA, mobile phones and the MRI (based on Dr. McCoy's diagnostic table).[37] It has also brought to popular attention the concept of teleportation with its depiction of "matter-energy transport."

According to EFF, the initial copyright term was triggered when Guthrie sold his first versions of the song as sheet music in 1945. The copyright on the song then ran out when Ludlow failed to renew its registration in 1973. Ludlow believes its copyright -- initially filed in 1956 and renewed in 1984 -- remains valid and disputes EFF's claims.

The idea of copyright law is that, after a time, every work comes back into the hands of the public, where it can be reused, recycled, made part of new creativity without having to pay a fee or call in the lawyers. That's a great thing, the real genius of copyright.

JibJab dismissed its suit against Ludlow today. As part of the settlement of the case, JibJab will remain free to continue distributing the "This Land" animation without further interference from Ludlow.

The term carries a bias that is not hard to see: it suggests thinking about copyright, patents and trademarks by analogy with property rights for physical objects. (This analogy is at odds with the legal philosophies of copyright law, of patent law, and of trademark law, but only specialists know that.) These laws are in fact not much like physical property law, but use of this term leads legislators to change them to be more so. Since that is the change desired by the companies that exercise copyright, patent and trademark powers, the bias of “intellectual property” suits them.

one issue relating to copyright law is whether music sharing should be allowed. Patent law has nothing to do with this. Patent law raises issues such as whether poor countries should be allowed to produce life-saving drugs and sell them cheaply to save lives. Copyright law has nothing to do with such matters.

If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, or copyrights, or trademarks, the first step is to forget the idea of lumping them together, and treat them as separate topics.

the factors to be considered shall include— (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Companies that choose to publish works under copy protection do so because they believe that the added expense of implementing the copy protection will be offset by even greater increases in revenue by creating a greater scarcity of casually copied media. Opponents of copy protection argue that people who obtain free copies only use what they can get for free, and would not purchase their own copy if they were unable to obtain a free copy. Some even argue that it increases profit; people who receive a free copy of a music CD may then go and buy more of that band's music, which they would not have done otherwise. Some publishers have avoided copy-protecting their products, on the theory that the resulting inconvenience to their users outweighs any benefit of frustrating "casual copying".

Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA.[citation needed] As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved, for a while negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial. The negotiations failed however, and Blizzard won the case on all counts: the defendants were ruled to have breached both StarCraft's End User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use of Battle.net.

BitTorrent accounted for 53 percent of all P2P Internet traffic in June of 2004.

P2P traffic accounts for two-thirds of the traffic on the 'Net

the Copyright Cartel is not going after the technology or the hosting companies. It is targeting Web site owners who have links on their sites to copyrighted material it is illegal for them to offer.

designed to protect the fixed expression or manifestation of an idea rather than the fundamental idea itself.

Copyright therefore may not subsist in the idea of a man venturing out on a quest, but may subsist in a particular story which follows that pattern.

Critics of the this so-called dichotomy point out that in many cases, the "expression" and the "idea" are both intangible ideas, and the nature of any such "expression" is inherently subjective. For example, in the case of the adventure story cited above, one judge might rule that changing the names, quest items, and personal habits of all the characters in the story is perhaps enough to create a distinct "expression"; other judges might rule that the two story ideas are essentially "the same", and do not have distinct "expressions".