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Wowsers MacTavish.

the goddamned secret service is who you call in these cases

I hope you are not a lawyer. You would be a very bad one.

(1) Except as otherwise specifically provided in this chapter any person who - ....... (d) intentionally uses, or endeavors to use, the contents of any wire, oral, or electronic communication, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through the interception of a wire, oral, or electronic communication in violation of this subsection; or ....... shall be punished as provided in subsection (4) or shall be subject to suit as provided in subsection (5).

Section 2(a)(ii)(B)(b)

(b) It shall not be unlawful under this chapter for an officer, employee, or agent of the Federal Communications Commission, in the normal course of his employment and in discharge of the monitoring responsibilities exercised by the Commission in the enforcement of chapter 5 of title 47 of the United States Code, to intercept a wire or electronic communication, or oral communication transmitted by radio, or to disclose or use the information thereby obtained.

The role of the EULA in this fiasco is implicitly legitimized (the entire concept of a "EULA," for those few who don't know, is largely an obnoxious legal fiction - sans UCITA, anyway)

Not sure what you're trying to say here. To wit, EULA's have been legitimate contracts even after the purchase transaction since 1996. The strongest argument against click-wrap EULA's is that you are only bound to the "shrink-wrap" terms, which you are aware of at time of purchase. Shrink-wrap is one contract to which you are bound when you complete the purchase transaction. A "click-wrap" EULA is another contract to which you are bound with some act of acknowlegment, typically upon installation or first use, by clicking something like 'I agree'.

The ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg [Full decision] case created the precedent that that a user engaging in some acknowledgment of the contractual terms, e.g. clicking 'I agree', is bound to the terms, regardless of a sparcity of terms on the shrink-wrap. Incidentally, the contract can't be unconscionable; any clause permitting modification of the licensing terms will probably require reasonable notice; if you don't agree to the terms of the click-wrap, you are almost certainly legally entitled to refund (whether you can enforce that at a reasonable price is another question).

In either case, a EULA is most certainly a legal reality. The judiciary of virtually every industrialized country upholds EULAs on the grounds that they provide economic certainty and legal predictability. Enforceable and extensive click-wrap contractual obligations promote commercial incentives and protect corporate interests. Courts entertain that argument.

Huh? In the U.S., building, zoning, subdivision, and other regulatory codes are written and enforced at the municipal or county level with some general rules dictated by state statutes. One wouldn't go to a courthouse to get them, but to City Hall, and there would be no copyright as they are a regulatory code. Perhaps parent is referring to a codifier (who compiles and publishes codes, ordinances, etc) who can copyright the presentation or codification, but not the laws themselves (cf. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc.)!

The fact that such a clause should even be necessary points to the warped mindset of the **AAs, of course.

It could be useful to paint the bill as the "It will make it illegal to fast-forward through commercials!!" to get the word out.

IANAL, so I could very well be wrong.

This ruling is just plain wrong. Here's text directly from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Straight from the definitions:

(1) "wire communication" means any aural transfer made in
whole or in part through the use of facilities for the
transmission of communications by the aid of wire, cable, or
other like connection between the point of origin and the point
of reception (including the use of such connection in a switching
station) furnished or operated by any person engaged in providing
or operating such facilities for the transmission of interstate
or foreign communications for communications affecting interstate
or foreign commerce and such term includes any electronic storage
of such communication;

and then later...

(17) "electronic storage" means--

(A) any temporary, intermediate storage of a wire or
electronic communication incidental to the electronic
transmission thereof; and

So, it pretty clearly states that wire communications includes storage incidental to the communication, such as the email temporarily existing in RAM on a system before being sent. Given that RAM is typically volatile, I don't see how you could NOT call it temporary, intermediate storage.

There are no exemptions that I can find in the ECPA that might give this scumbag a way out of this. Either the judges are smoking crack, or the prosecutors failed to use the ECPA properly. I suspect it's more of the latter, as even the dissenting judge said that "the law has failed to adapt to the realities of Internet communications." This simply isn't true, because it's quite well defined in the law. The law HAS adapted to the realities of the Internet, and the ECPA is mostly quite adequate.

Here's a mirror of the full ECPA text for those curious:

ECPA text

Well, I don't know about you, but I've thought very hard about what privacy is and why I think it should be considered extremely important in this day and age. My information is my property and I will fight tooth and nail to make sure noone I don't want seeing it gets their money-grabbing propaganda-spewing indoctrinating hands on it. I'd suggest everyone else does the same, but.... que sera sera. sigh.

Some googling around finds:

* Re: "Double" Licenses--enforceability of shrinkwrap and clickwrap licenses

* WASHINGTON COURT OF APPEALS UPHOLDS ENFORCABILITY OF "SHRINK-WRAP" SOFTWARE LICENSES

* Shrink-wrap software licenses upheld

* Contractor Denied Recovery for $1.95 Million Bidding Error Caused by Allegedly Defective Software

* CPT's Page on the Enforceability of Shrinkwrap Licenses

* ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3D 1447 (7th Cir., June 20, 1996). This
phone directory data case is important because it validates the legality of
"shrink wrap" software licenses for the first time. This case suggests that
similar "on screen acceptance" licenses, now commonly used on the Internet,
may also be upheld as legal someday. The phone directory database at issue
in this case was not protected by copyright, but was protected by contract.
So the person who published ProCD's phone directories on the Internet was
found to have breached the shrink wrap license agreement that came with the
software.

* In Bowers v. Baystate Technologies Inc., 64 USPQ2d 1065 (CA FC 2002), the Federal Circuit has upheld a contractual no-reverse engineering restriction in an agreement between two parties in a software license that was characterized by the court as shrink wrap.

Forget the TOS dude! If your company resells it as their own, their violating that content's copyright.

Not if it is factual information, as supported by the classic supreme court decision of Feist Publishing vs. Rural Telephone Service Company, which held that facutal information cannot be copyrighted.

You can't copyright facts. There was a court case about whether or not a phone book could be copyrighted, the court said no.

Actually, the Supreme Court has held, in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service, 499 U.S. 340 (1991) 499 U.S. 340, that collections of data that are not at all creative are not copyrightable. The West Publishing Group, the folks that publish most of the court decisions in the US have been pushing for copyright-like protection for years. It looks like they've finally managed to pay off enough people to get it.

The real problem is that now West and their ilk will "own" the public data they collect. Because they data is not generally available through other sources, everyone will have to pay for supposedly public information.