Slashdot Mirror

That would be state and federal wiretapping statutes. According to this law review article, you're on very thin ice even if you're in a one-party consent state: http://digitalcommons.law.seat...

In a one party state, you'd be relying on the doctrine of "vicarious consent", which parents can sometimes do for children, because of our culture's disgusting history of treating children like subhumans that are their parents' property, and which is exactly as stupid as it sounds. It's also not a slam dunk to win with. Here's a relevant South Carolina Supreme Court ruling setting out the standards for vicarious consent to be applicable in that state: http://www.gregoryforman.com/b...

In a two-party consent state, you're obviously doing something illegal unless the call is between two of your little flowers in the attic.

Combine this with the 9th Circuit ruling in Sega v. Accolade , and you have a pretty good case.

Now starting at a little over $60k programming at a place in the Seattle area. I have more experience than the average college grad though.

His point, while put in a rather sneering, ranting tone, is well-taken. It is a fact that most PHBs don't get there because of merit. They get there because they went to the right prep school, Daddy knew the right people, their frat brothers (whom they used to drink a fifth a weekend with) helped them, etc. Also, there is some credence to the notion that B-schoolers don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. As a former one myself (before I saw the light,) I can tell you that they have as many classes on etiquette and protocol as they do academics. Look where business administration majors score - fifth from the bottom! Where's my major? Second from the top, even beating out comp. sci. and engineering. WOOHOO!!

I agree that social skills are necessary. I agree that one has to be able to get along to a certain extent. But social skills are one thing, getting by because you're a bullshit artist in an expensive suit is quite another. Most corporate higher-ups fit into the latter category, and we saw it in excelsis during the dot.bomb era.

Now it's my turn to rant. This proves what a lot of people suspect about CEOs and other higher-ups in companies. Namely, that they are spoiled, pampered, self-important, pompous assholes who have never worked a hard day in their lives and wouldn't know an honest day's work if it bit them in the face. They don't need the training because, hey, we're bigshots. We've people for those menial tasks. "We're too good for the mere IT mortals, we deserve private training." Yeah, along with your private dining room, private bathroom, private jet, etc., etc., etc . . .

Ok this is where I lose you. That link says that Mozilla is going to provide spam filters. How is that bloatware? Trolling? Got me.

Well, doesn't have the kitchen sink yet, but I hear they're working hard on that. What does it have? Let's see here, web browser, email fetching, filtering, and sorting; news client, chat client, HTML design frontend, contacts manager, banner ad blocking, the list goes on. This all culminates in 20MB or so of source that took six and a half hours to compile on my Duron 800.

Last time I checked, all of this comes very close to the textbook definition of feature creep and bloat. And now, coming to a Mozilla near you, spam filters! They're not fixing any of their nearly 12,000 bugs. In other words, yes, it's buggier than Win2K, but by God, it filters spam! I included the spam filters link to illustrate the Bill-worthy feature creep Mozilla suffers from.

Lest you think I'm the only one saying this, JWZ, one of the principal authors of Netscape, resigned from Netscape and Mozilla.org over these very issues.

I've spelled it out for you this far, might as well carry on until the bitter end. My ultimate point was that if Mozilla were a Microsoft product, the righteous wrath of /. would be brought to bear on it for all of these reasons. But since it's not, it can commit all of these Gatesian mortal sins and escape such scrutiny.

Agian ya lost me. I use Mozilla every day. I havent found anything major. Well besides the bug they just fixed.

Read my post - I use it all the time too. And quite often, I find that it doesn't work right. It tries to load forms as perl scripts to save on the HDD. It doesn't handle Java well at all. Plugins take forever to load. It randomly eats my SMTP server entry. My point is, there is much room for improvement. But no, they've taken the Gatesian approach of kludging feature upon feature atop a buggy, marginally-usable codebase.

Ranting??? School? Get a life. At least your school runs opensource. (maybe judging from the rest of your post)

Wrong as usual. My school does not run open source. They got taken in by the slick-talking outsourcing salesdroids and are now firmly wedded to His Billness. But what the hell, did you expect anything different just across the bridge from Redmond? Be that as it may, the only reason I brought it up was to say when I intended to nuke Windows from my computer, and that only to show I'm not a trolling Microdroid evangelist.

I really should stop feeding these trolls

Re-read my previous paragraph. Carefully. Again. And again. And think hard before you hit submit next time.

Well, yes, they can probably put whatever they want in it. I've seen EULA's that literally say they get your first born. That's not the interesting question. The question is-- what will actually hold up?

EULA's have severe limits. In Vault v. Quaid, it was held that an EULA can't infringe on federally protected consumer rights, such as noninfringing use, reverse engineering, and so on.

I found a rather interesting article dealing with copyright law vs. shrinkwrap licenses here. It's worth reading, since IP and EULA's seem to come up here quite often. It doesn't have an immediate interpretation of the current situation. However, it is evident that typically courts agree with the notion that EULA's cannot be used to artificially block legitimate competition, since that runs entirely counter to the purpose of the copyright laws they're predicated on.

Could MS be sued for copyright breach on the grounds that the displayed page is now a derived work?

Sure. The plaintiff would lose, tho. See Nintendo v. Galoob. Galoob made a product that altered the reactions, graphics, and gameplay of Nintendo's copyrighted stuff. Nintendo sued for copyright infringement, and lost. The product? Game Genie.

2600 themselves had the DeCSS code on their site, so they were responsible. I am an ISP. If one of my users posts the DeCSS code on their home page, I am not responsible nor liable. A Cease and Desist letter from MPAA would not be cause of concern to me. But it would be of concern to the user.

This is dangerous ignorance.

Tell it to Netcom.

From the posted items, it appears the infringement claims may be based on either copyright or patents or both, and that the jurisdiction may be European. As I'm also not a lawyer, the following information may be highly irrelevant, though I hope it's illuminating.

First, it's not clear that there are legal grounds to pull the plug an an entire website based on alleged but not (at least publicly) specified infringemnt. If nothing else, ISPs may face significant backlash risks for violating common carrier covenants to provide equal service to all without prejudice. My reading of the US DMCA (Millenium Copyright Act) is that protection against copyright infringment on the part of customers is offered in return for a clarification of common-carrier status, and liability limitations. This is US law and doesn't apply in the UK, but a similar legal tradition exists there.

Second, there is precedent under US law of a similar type of reverse engineering in the case of either Sega v. Accolade or Atari v. Nintendo (I don't recall which, and it may have been another, but these are the two major cases in the area, and the subject was gaming). The basic premise was that the defendant's hardware require both reverse engineering of software to allow cartridges to run on it, and a literal copying of some small portion (14 bytes?) of code was required by the security or authentication mechanism of the console, including, IIRC, an encoded trademark. These were held to have functional, not expressive, attributes, and the defendents won in both cases.

I suspect a bit of bluster here, and while I wouldn't run for shelter in the information I've provided, I might look to it for some ideas for defense.

No, even copying the WHOLE of a copyrighted work
for purposes OTHER than commentary can sometimes
be "fair use".

You should read the judgement in the Sega vs Accolade
case that was linked to in the article,
in particular paragraphs 29 onwards
(the second half).