Since mathematical operations and algorithms are equivalent, any attempt to draw a bright line between them will be totally arbitrary and likely to lead to absurdities, as indeed it already has. the “Fair Use Guidelines For Educational Multimedia”, a document published in 1986 that attempted to establish “ bright line rules” for determining copyright compliance and educational fair use legality. The McCreary opinion, however, remains very narrowly crafted and failed to draw a bright line test for displays of religious symbols on government property.Īnd of the last few days of blog usage from Technorati: Later in the news conference, he said he fired the columnist because of the paper's ' bright line' on illegal activity and 'clear understanding' that the law was violated. there was one thing the MPAA drew a bright line against: 'We were told in no uncertain terms that showing the kids smoking or drinking. It provides a bright-line definition for people coming in so they know what they can expect. That ability seems to mark a bright line between those species and monkeys, who, scientists have long assumed, look into mirrors and see only strangers. The Democrat is eager to make the 2004 tax and budget packages a bright-line issue between him and Kilgore. I wonder what the history of this expression is, and why the dictionaries have missed it. ( link) The “Bright Line” is any legal principle that is so certain that every day citizens and businessmen can plan their activities confident of the legal standards that apply. In policy debate, it is a topicality standard which argues that the definition is black and white, that one can easily tell whether or not a specific circumstance meets the definition.Īnd you can find other suggested definitions on the web: ( link) A bright-line rule is a clear-cut, easy to make decision.

You could easily figure out what the expression means from these examples, if you didn't already know, and there's also a Wikipedia stub for bright-line rule: Searching today's Google News brings up 104 examples, and Technorati finds 20 blog examples in the past three days. Google has 193,000 hits for 'bright line', a substantial fraction of which seem to be instances of this expression. Here's another common expression that's not in the standard dictionaries: bright line, in the sense of 'clear criterion of demarcation'.You won't find it in the American Heritage Dictionary (fourth edition), Merriam-Webster's Unabridged (third edition), Encarta, or the Oxford English Dictionary, but it's widely used these days.

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