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You appear to be ignorant of the principle of implied consent

It is not "Stealing" nor "Theft of services" nor "Unauthorized use of a computer" nor "Computer trespass" according to New York Law, for one example.

Perhaps you'd like a scholarly article on why we should not make your assumptions (and get indignant about it, I might add) from George Washington University - Law School

In fact, I had already given you examples of use which are not stealing, and you are choosing to ignore them so you can't redundantly say stealing is stealing. On the off chance that you blacked out, the examples were anonymous FTP and a web server sharing files. P2P is another situation where you could be sharing files by mistake, but it's reasonable to assume that it is not by mistake - and downloaders use more of your computer resources than someone sending data through your router.

It takes all of one minute to turn on security. You do *not* have to be a hacker - what a canard that is. I won't claim that there isn't anyone who wouldn't be able to do it, but society cannot always limit itself to what the least of us can do. There is no victim in this scenario, just someone who has shared their network, so deserve has nothing to do with it. I was merely suggesting that being lazy and ignorant usually means you are to blame when you do something you did not intend.

Enough of your feeble attempts to claim I will take other people's physical property if it's not bolted down. You are obviously having trouble recognizing the difference between a car parked in your garage and a service that you are broadcasting onto my property which advertises itself as non-private and explicitly authorizes me to join the network.

Is it possible that reasonable people can reach this conclusion? Or am I the only asocial moron with a toddler's mentality?

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060227-6272.html
http://www.dispatch.com/live/contentbe/dispatch/2006/02/26/20060226-H2-03.html
http://blogs.computerworld.com/why_its_ok_to_steal_wi_fi
http://zovirl.com/2006/07/27/you-cant-steal-wifi/
http://www.volokh.com/posts/1179938755.shtml

You may not agree, but you should not continue to pretend that all people who hold this view think it's OK to steal. Try to learn that much.

Any private company or citizen can censor all they want. The protections of free speech are toward the government NOT against free citizens or the companies they own.

Not quite. Suppose Flickr decided to remove any pictures of black people or catholics, do you think they would be exercising legitimate property rights? Do you think that they could get away with it? Property rights are not absolute. They can be trumped by other rights - free speech can be one of those rights. This case isn't so clear cut as many on /. claim. In the US, in 1980, the California Supreme Court became the first state high court to rule that under its own Constitution shopping malls were public forums. link Private property, but free speech.

Not to say it's never happened before. Terrorists, pedophiles, drug abusers... they all welcome tax evaders as the new bogeyman by which the government can shoehorn new bad laws onto the books with overreaching influence.

So am I for tax-dodgers? No: the people not paying taxes on their ebay stores are ALREADY breaking the law and can ALREADY be successfully prosecuted for it. Financial records can be obtained by subpoena and the proper procedure within the justice system. This bill would force all handlers of electronic payment to account and disclose information at THEIR expense (read: our expense because profit margins sure as hell aren't going to take the hit from government compliance costs). Now justice and investigation doesn't need a warrant or a court order because private companies are now compelled to broadcast this data.

Well.. yeah, you have a point. but at least they can't data mine this way unless they control the key server itself all the time.

When your dealing with an entity like government .. it's pretty difficult to stop them from doing something. I mean.. they could just make encryption itself illegal if they wanted.

It is our duty to stop them from doing that.. You have a right to privacy, you have a right to not show someone the inside of your house, the inside of your gym locker, the inside of your bank account, or the inside of your private letters. Governments should respect that right. A good paper came out a while ago called "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

Looks may help, but it's more than that. Women typically vote for perceived security over freedoms. This is most pronounced when they are single. When they are married they vote more like a man. Don't mod me troll until you've read the paper.

there is as-yet little legal precedent in the US backing up any sort of EULA-type "agreement" that restricts how end users can actually use the end products.

As such, *all* end users are essentially free to do what they want with software under *any* license, within the (admittedly obfuscated, and currently imperiled) bounds of copyright.

The GPL in all its various forms simply attempts to define that proper permission. If folks don't like what such permission entails, fine -- bloody well don't use GPL-covered code.

Whining about not getting a free ride just makes people look like wankers. Whine, whine, whinge. Meh.

Myths and Realities About the USA H1-B Program

Myth: H1-Bs are the "best and brightest"

Reality: If that were true then the typical H1-B would a Nobel prize winning scientist. The truth is, the typical H1-B is an average student, hired right out of college with only a four year degree. The typical H1-B is no more qualified than the US graduates who are not getting jobs. The H1-Bs are just cheaper. And because of the lottery nature of the H1-B process, employers do not even know who they are getting. So how do employers know that they are getting the best and brightest?

Also, isn't it funny that almost all of the "best and brightest" come from countries where people earn as little as $1 a day? If it's really about the "best and brightest" then why aren't there more European H1-Bs?

----

Myth: H1-Bs are needed because of the critical shortage of US technology workers

Reality: Serious academic studies clearly indicate that skills shortage is a myth.

> These studies done at Duke aren't alone in their assessment that there is in fact no skills shortage. They're backed up by other studies conducted by RAND Corporation, The Urban Institute and Stanford University, among others, all of which settle upon the same conclusion: There is no shortage of educated IT workers.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1081923#PaperDownload

This according to a well researched article at baselinemag.com:

http://tinyurl.com/yoy2rw

----

Myth: H1-Bs do compete unfairly, because H1-Bs are paid the prevailing wage

Reality:

> According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) as the measurement of U.S. wages, and the H-1B LCA disclosure data to measure H-1B wages, 90% of H-1B employers' prevailing wage claims for programmers were below the median U.S. wage for that occupation and location, with 62% of them falling in the bottom 25th percentile of U.S. wages, said Miano [founder of the Programmer's Guild].

> Ron Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology (currently on leave) and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, pointed to USCIS's most recent report to Congress, which shows that the medium wage in 2005 for new H-1B computing professionals was just $50,000 -- even lower than the entry-level wages that a newly graduated tech worker with a bachelor's degree and no experience would command.

http://tinyurl.com/4bvwyh

According to the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Service's (USCIS) annual report to Congress in 2005, the aggregate data for computing professionals lend support to the argument that the practice of paying H-1Bs below-market wages is quite common.

http://www.sharedprosperity.org/bp187.html

H1-Bs are hired at four different skill levels, "4" being the highest. But most H1-Bs are hired for the lowest "1" level jobs - regardless of what kind of work the H1-Bs actually do.

----

Myth: In the USA enrollment in technical disciplines is declining. Proof the USA needs to hire more foreign workers

Reality: This myth is designed to confuse cause and effect. Employers are not forced to hire offshore because enrollment is down. Rather, enrollment is down because of aggressive offshoring by employers. But even with enrollments down, there are still more than enough US workers.

> Due to both outsourcing and insourcing, many young people are concluding that technology is a bad place to invest their time," said Mark Thoma, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon in Euge

Let me acquaint you with the well known term - cellophane fallacy.

It is commonly agreed that this case was decided incorrectly.

The above was only semi-serious, but not at all flamebait. One of several studies showing the relationship between woman's suffrage and the explosion of government size and scope is here.

The report is now available to download from SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1128203

You should be concerned about those yellow dots only if you planning to violate the law.

The only argument that I can think of for the other side would look to the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment. But there is a fatal flaw in that argument. A violation of copyright is not a taking of property. If you violate someone's copyright, they are still the copyright holder. A copyright violation is NOT a taking of property. Without a taking of life, liberty, or property, Due Process is not required, and the 14th Amendment is not implicated.

It's easy to argue that copyright violation IS a taking of property, and in fact, with regard to patent rights, the U.S. federal government has and does pay infringement royalties under the theory of eminent domain.

The 'property' inherent in both copyright and patent grants is not the piece of paper that you still possess after the government has infringed on the rights, but rather the underlying right to keep other people, including those in the government, from using your ideas without your consent or profit. Those rights ARE potentially being infringed, even though you still have the piece of paper that grants you the copyright/patent, and even if you can still assert those rights against other parties.

So, the government has taken away your ability to control the use of the copyright/patent, and that is the property they must pay for. You then apply established commercial criteria for valuing the infringement (FMV/reasonable rates for copyright licenses and royalties), in order to calculate damages the government would have to pay.

---

While the below references apply to patent rights, the legal analysis re: copyrights would be similar, I think.

"Treating the Legal Side Effects of Cipro(R): A Reevaluation of Compensation Rules for Government Takings of Patent Rights"

The author finds that, under the current statutory scheme, unauthorized government appropriations of private patent rights should be treated as eminent domain takings, compensable at the level required by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, the author determines that Fifth Amendment compensation for patent takings is properly calculated by the same rules employed to assess non-punitive, actual damages in private infringement actions.

---

NY Times article

"American law is very clear: when the United States government needs a patented product, any official authorized to make purchases can ignore the patent and license someone else to make it."

''Any employee of the United States government can authorize a compulsory license for the product without even holding a hearing,'' said James P. Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, part of Ralph Nader's organization pushing for lower drug prices. ''The company can't even sue to enjoin the government from doing it. All they can do is sue for compensation.''

"That compensation, Mr. Love said, is based on eminent domain, the principle used when the government seizes land for a highway or military base. A judge picks an amount based on lost value, but not necessarily the highest price that could have been charged. The government uses the law fairly frequently, Mr. Love said."

Recycling of an old post:

'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

Abstract:
In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: I've got nothing to hide. According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

I've Got Nothing to Hide

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=684425

That might pose a problem. There is a reason that the fed expands money supply.

• Tax Break Prompts Millionaires To Create Private Foundations: Many of these same "feel-good" workers, though, have their own opinion about private foundations. And it isn't pretty. In the best of all worlds, they say, private foundations, like their public counterparts, would help address problems like hunger or illiteracy; in truth, they charge, such charities tend to address the whims and agendas of their benefactors, whose motivations don't always fit the notion of "charity."
• The trustees' perk that keeps on giving: The foundation's accountant, Martin Logies of Sunnyvale, Calif., defended the benefits, saying they had been approved by the foundation's board of directors. But he acknowledged that Sara and Anders Kierulf are the board's only members, and that they approved the benefits for themselves. As to the work the Kierulfs perform for their pay, Logies demurred. "I couldn't give you that information," he said.
• Deduction Ad Absurdum: CEOs Donating Their Own Stock to Their Own Family Foundations: Consistent with their exemption from insider trading law, I find that CEOs' stock gifts occur just prior to significant drops in their firms' stock prices, a pattern that enables the donors to obtain increased personal income tax benefits. This timing is more pronounced when executives donate their own shares to their own family foundations
• Tax Me If You Can: FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith investigates the rampant abuse of tax shelters since the late 1990s. Through interviews with government officials, tax experts, and industry insiders, Smith uncovers an avalanche of bogus transactions -- created by some of America's biggest and most-respected accounting firms, law firms, and investment banks -- that were then aggressively marketed to big corporations and wealthy individuals.
• How Tax Shelters Brought Trouble to Billionaire Clan: The panel's senior Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, has been probing offshore tax evasion and money laundering for several years. The panel is also looking into how the elite New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP provided legal advice on offshore tax shelters to wealthy individuals, people familiar with the probe say.

Wouldn't a good analyst pay lots of attention to things like the executives' 10b5-1 plans? As others have observed, the cancellation of a scheduled sale suggests the insider believes his or her holdings will appreciate. Jagolinzer's study, cited by Wikileaks, suggests that a good strategy for outsiders would be to sell stocks when key insiders announce they've set up plans and buy stocks when insiders cancel sales. His research indicates plans are adopted to lock in current asset values in anticipation of a falling stock price, while cancellations occur when insiders expect the stock to appreciate.

What good came out of the current US administration?

• Africa Aid Program
• Formally withdrew US support for the International Criminal Court. I know some people think this is just go-it-alone cowboy Bush, but surprisingly its just a continuation of Clinton policy. The trouble with the ICC is that it purports to have jurisdiction to retry US (or other) citizens (double-jeopardy) if the 4th, 5th, 6th amendments get in the way. The ICC treaty does not limit itself to "war crimes" and can subject people to lengthy detention without charge, no right to cross-examination, no juries, no warrant requirements, no right against self-incrimination, etc, etc. See for instance Toward an International Criminal Procedure: Due Process Aspirations and Limitations
• Medicare prescription drug benefit--which has been working out surprisingly well contrary to all of the scare rhetoric from the AARP.
• No Child Left Behind while flawed was certainly a step-forward--especially for minority students

Putting that aside, the fact is that regulations rarely have their full, intended effect, especially on the first go. If you read the aforementioned speech, it's pretty obvious that the SEC is trying to do the right thing: Allow executives (particularly founders and other holders of large percentages of stock) the ability to sell those shares on a pre-determined schedule, unencumbered by any insider information they have at a given time during the execution of that plan and unconcerned about the way the market would view the sale, since it had been planned and announced far in advance. For someone with a large percentage of stock, the ability to trade out of that position smoothly over time is critical, since any large sale would be disruptive to the market, and frequent small sales would likely be difficult due to the fact that they might coincide with the common circumstance of having insider information.

The problem, of course, is while the executive is not supposed to initiate the sales plan based on insider information, that same executive may cancel a sale or withdraw from the plan entirely based on non-public, material information. In doing so, they create a bias in that their sales that were initiated would be expected to perform "better than average", since any sales that would have performed "worse than average" are more likely to have been canceled. Such a bias is precisely what academics found and is referenced in Thomsen's speech. The SEC can then amend/interpret the rule so as to close any loophole. Such a process may go through multiple iterations before all the holes are patched.

In terms of the Wikileaks article itself, there are a few problems: First, it is not just "small investors" who are hurt by this. Any investor, small or large, who is not an "insider" would be disadvantaged by such activity. There's no need to be a populist to see the potential for abuse here. The second problem is that it is JP Morgan's fiduciary duty to offer the best product available to its clients, including taking advantage of the specifics of SEC regulations, if necessary. Of course, this particular opportunity is available only certain, very wealthy insiders, but that's the circumstance that the SEC created, not JP Morgan. This situation is no more unethical than Mercedes or Volvo building a "safer" automobile that is only available to those wealthy enough to afford it--and it carries the same hazard for others, actually, since a "protected" driver may be more reckless and endanger other drivers.

In short, there's no need to get bent out of shape when a necessarily imperfect law or regulation is exploited to someone's advantage. This is just what people will do in any system. The only solution is to keep in mind unintended consequences and improve the framework that one has for the future.

I highly recommend a read through it, he explains why people have so much trouble understanding what privacy is, why it is important, and what the real tradeoffs are when trying to balance the benefit of some new proposed security measures against the privacy harms they will inflict.

(If you scroll down to the "Chicago GSB" download link, it should let you download the .pdf with no registration required)

Such companies are not really off the hook, but a level of indirection can often diffuse blame. Humans have a judgment bias that sees indirect harm as less bad than direct harm. Legally there's no difference (murder-for-hire vs. hire), but ethically people have to work harder before they see the two harms as equivalent.

For example, in 2006 Merck sold the marketing rights to a cancer drug to a small company named Ovation, who then charged exorbitant rates to recoup the costs. Merck kept the sales proceeds, and continued to produce the drug, but Ovation was the company charging patients ten times more. Ovation's business model is to act as a buffer for large pharmaceutical firms that want to get a large payday out of a niche drug without getting their hands dirty.

For more information, check See No Evil: When We Overlook Other People's Unethical Behavior (Gino, Moore and Bazerman 2008) and The Preference for Indirect Harm (Royzman and Baron 2002, Social Justice Research).

You have a good point, but I assume the copyright crowd is going at this from a couple of angles:

A) Actual damages are quite hard to prove in court, which is the point of creating statutory damages. They might not even bother asking for them, lest they have to justify what actual damages they've suffered from infringement. Of course, they may not have suffered any actual damages, or may not be able to prove that they have.

B) While they're not punitive damages, they're high enough that they can be seen in that light. As such, they could be an insufficient penalty.

That said, $150,000 for infringing upon an average 10-song CD that goes for $20 retail and $10 on iTunes is already unconstitutionally excessive per a Supreme Court ruling (BMW v. Gore) that looked askance at some statutory damages that were merely a few times the actual damages. The PRO-IP Act here would raise that to $1,500,000 ($150,000 for each song on the CD), which is even more excessive than before.

After all, how many copyrighted works sell for $150,000 to begin with? And don't list long-dead painters. Their works hit the public domain long before copyrights got an extra hundred years or more of life with the life+70 term passed back in the 1970s.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

James Besen and Eric Maskin, Sequential Innovation, patents and imitation. It was on the web some years ago as an MIT working paper.

Bronwyn H. Hall and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, The Patent Paradox Revisited: Determinants of Patenting in the US Semiconductor Industry, 1980-94

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=158610

drafts of both that and this:

Bronwyn H. Hall and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, The effects of strengthening patent rights on firms engaged in cumulative innovation: insights from the semiconductor industry.

from here:

http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/bhhall/bhpapers.html

Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not)

http://www.nber.org/papers/W7552.pdf

The "Nothing To Hide" argument was effectively addressed and invalidated by Daniel J. Solove in:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID998565_code249137.pdf?abstractid=998565&mirid=1

I think originally learned about this article on an old Slashdot story...

Ah yes, here it is: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/2054219

I agree. Very much worth the read.
Print it out, and give it to someone else to read too.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

... again and again and again and ...

I'm always amazed just how often this and other nonsense comes up. Then I remember that today's people have attention spans of chronically depressed Lemmings and it all comes rushing back... along with that deep sickening sinking feeling.

At any rate, here's a good essay (found it linked to on Schneier's blog) that destroys the argument:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

Just used it on my parents a couple days ago. Spread it around!

I'm not ashamed of anything in my medical records [...]

You're failing to understand that you cannot predict which people will find which information about you discreditable in what way, and what they will do or not do about it. Whether you're "ashamed" or not is irrelevant--plenty of people who aren't in any way ashamed of some trait of theirs still would prefer to control who gets to know about it, because they would likely face discrimination about it if disclosed.

Two obvious examples are sexual orientation for out-of-the-closet gays, and race for job applicants (if potential employers can infer from your resume that you're black, you're less likely to get called back; no, I'm not making this up). Another example from articles linked in some comments in this discussion: diabetes.

There was a good article about the "nothing to hide" argument : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

I found this interesting paper which attempts to define the concept of privacy from a legal perspective:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=667622#PaperDownload

The author takes a look at how the use of IT can change our understanding of privacy and even create new ways of infringing personal privacy.

He suggests a taxonomy of privacy to enable a more sensible application of existing laws and the development of new legislation:
Information Collection, including Surveillance and Interrogation
Information Processing, including Aggregation, Identification, Insecurity, Secondary uses, and Exclusion
Information Dissemination, including Breach of Confidentiality, Disclosure, Exposure, Increased accessibility, Blackmail, Appropriation and Distortion
Invasion, including Intrusion and Decisional Interference

I'm interested to hear a Slashdot perspective on whether you feel that these categories would be sufficient to plan future legislation to protect privacy?

I came across this paper while researching the question of privacy of personal health records.
An elderly person that we interviewed commented, "You could post my information on the Internet, if that's what it takes to get me well".
I have heard more concerns about health information privacy from healthy people, than from those who are ill.

Which raises the question of whether privacy is only important when our more basic needs are already satisfied?

Here's a paper on this, which goes into great detail on the role of patent dealers in the market from an economic and policy point of view.

I'm quite often laughed at by various friends because I encrypt all my hard disks, I do not log in cybercafes or open networks. I do not use a BlackBerry, nor Facebook. I usually pay by cash and rarely by credit card, etc

I just get used to it and stop trying to teach them even the basics (e.g. do not post your work email on a public forum for instance). I just try to insist a bit with good friends.

However, the problem is that there has been a general trend educating people to relinquish their privacy. Many governments (most notably the US) have rather clearly stated that "state security" was more important than individual privacy and many people agreed. Many media, and most notably the online ones have also distilled that fact that privacy was unimportant. I was amazed to see that the "youngest" generation does not communicate by email, not by IM, but by blogging. I have seen kids that would write a blog entry when they want to send one message to one person...

Also, oddly enough, giving examples does not work. Even real examples with real people whose life have been screwed badly. The first reaction of people is that it cannot happen to them.

It really seems people only get a grasp of what privacy is when they have lost it.

Anyway, there are of some interesting tidbits on privacy at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

"'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy" by Daniel J. Solove
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

IO involves the use of information technology, such as computer network attacks or psychological operations, to influence, disrupt, corrupt, usurp or defend information systems and the infrastructure they support. More than thirty states have developed IO capacities. But IO is also undoubtedly attractive to non-state actors like Al Qaeda, since the technology is mostly inexpensive, easy-to-use, and capable of deployment from virtually anywhere.

Yeah, what's the story with executive remuneration? It's ridiculous.

Executive remuneration is increasing at a far quicker pace than average weekly earnings.

It's all good and well to give executives incentives that are linked to corporate performance, but it pisses me off to no end when they get those bonuses ANYWAY even when they haven't met their targets.

I DON'T believe this is just free-market at work ... it boils down to the fact that they set their own pay. (Crikey, let me set my own pay !!)

There is new one IP = intellectual privileges, it only considers copyrights and patents, trademarks are excluded since they are not developed to be incentive for creators. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1023735 http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071023/133936.shtml http://www.intellectualprivilege.com/blog/

No, really, read the paper before you mod me off-topic — page 1180 (24th of PDF):

SunnComm, the company that delivered MediaMax, offered even more cause for concern. The company began as a provider of Elvis impersonation services. After a change in management following a false press release announcing a non-existent $25 million production deal with Warner Brothers, the company purchased a 3.5" floppy disk factory in 2001, displaying a disturbing dearth of technological savvy. After two employees announced their intention to leave the fledgling company to develop copy protection software, SunnComm convinced the pair to lead a new division, leaving both Elvis and floppy discs behind in order to develop what would become MediaMax.

I swear, I'd be hard pressed to come up with anything this surreal even if I tried.

Ron Paul !!! The others are Fed Reserve puppets working for the money. There's a great paper discussing privacy at: 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565 It talks about how privacy benefits society as a whole.

Consider that Lott and Whitley's paper was published in 2001. Levitt has since replied to critics (pdf) (Journal of Human Resources, 2004, 39(1), pp. 29-49) and refined his theory.

Note that the "lifenews" article you're referencing was published in 2006... 5 years after the study came out. A little late and ignoring a lot of developements in the field, yes?

I believe you'll find that the rule against perpetuities is of English origin. The US is better known for being early in abolishing the fee tail.

Somehow, though, we've never viewed Copyright in this same light

Copyright originated from this manner of thinking. May I suggest you read this paper about the origins of copyright, particularly in the US. I enjoyed it a lot. I would also fight very hard against life+18. For some works, 15 years is far too long. A modest quantity of very short terms (e.g. 1-2 year terms which at most might be renewable up to a total of 20 years, and in some cases much less) strikes me as better given how the economics of creative works actually plays out.

Under the current system, the easiest way for examiners to get quota points is to reject applications, which is exactly what they do. Over 95% of patent applications are initially rejected, which is why the patent process is so expensive. See SSRN for a published study that addresses the quota issue in detail.

What I should have said is a right explicitly contemplated by the constitution and subsequently granted by congress. Technically your clarification is correct, but my initial point about this being a right of content creators still stands even if it is a legislated right contemplated by the constitution rather than strictly a constitutional right.

Well, if I take your meaning correctly, in that you feel that the framers believed copyright to be a right on par with the right of free speech, then I'd still have to disagree.

First, remember that the United States predates the Constitution. Prior to the strong federal government established by the Constitution taking power, we had a government under the Articles of Confederation, in which the states had far more power than the United States did. Many of the states enacted their own copyright laws, but the laws differed in various respects, were of limited jurisdiction, and basically they made a hash out of it. Thus, the only reason that the copyright power is in the Constitution at all is because the states had demonstrated their incompetence in that field, and a uniform national approach -- whatever that would consist of, and which could well be no law at all -- was needed. That is, it was a practical matter, not the product of some lofty ideal as to authorial rights.

Second, really only Englishmen (and formerly English colonials) cared about authorial copyright at all. No one else had it at the time. And aside from a few radicals, and a large number of pernicious book publishers who were suspiciously akin to the publishers of today (MPAA, RIAA, etc.) everyone felt that the purpose of copyright was to prevent censorship and monopolies (which is what the Stationers had originally had copyrights for) and to encourage learning, the progress of knowledge, etc. We see this in the Statute of Anne, in the Battle of the Booksellers, in the state acts, in the proposals in the Constitutional Convention (where it was proposed that there be copyright laws, patent laws, and a national university, since they all had to do with the same basic idea), in the final copyright clause, and in the 1790 Act.

There is an excellent article on this subject here and I would be very pleased if you'd read it.

You assume that the Founding Fathers intended for 90% of the government to come from local/state level, it might even be correct. However, the question is not what were their intentions but what is written in the constitution. By the way, they also intended for black people to be slaves and for women to have no vote, do you think anyone who think differently should not be entitled to vote? You might not say there is only one correct way to do things, but you definitly say there is a very small number of ways, and they can't be very different from yours.

I know of no writings left by the Founding Fathers where they stated that they believed slavery was right; I personally tend to believe that they realized they could not win that battle (look how long it took for the abolition movement to succeed) and focused pragmatically on what was within their power to achieve but I have not seen much evidence on this either way. Also, when it is studied objectively, it has been found that allowing women to vote may not be the best idea, because they tend to value security more than freedom and the type of security that government has to offer is a very dangerous thing. Please see the studies; there are very strong correlations between granting women suffrage and the expansion of the size and power of government. Some links: A brief summary that mentions this same belief, shared by a woman, a paper by John Lott on the subject (I believe this one is originally from here) and a general, light read on why big government is a bad idea here. You will find, however, that this is a subject where the facts tend not to reflect what people want to hear, and (because people often act like spoiled children when this is the case) it's hard to have a discussion about it in which people actually stick to facts and logic.

Regarding the "very small number of ways", I didn't just make this up in a vacuum, you know. Study a little history and you will find it plainly evident that every nation which has ever become a police state or a fascist dictatorship did so by allowing its government to become too large and too powerful and too involved in the everyday lives of its citizens and by considered myriad things other than defense, public works, and law enforcement to be its business. The idea is so simple. When an organ in the body carries out its function and serves the rest of the body (when the heart's only concern is pumping blood, when the lungs' only concern is respiration, etc.), that body is healthy; when an organ draws a disproportionate share of resources and multiplies its cells beyond what is necessary for its function, it grows out of control, concerns itself only with its own perpetuation, and becomes a cancer that threatens to kill the rest of the body. Likewise, government does the same and becomes a parasite feeding on its own people when it becomes the all-important solution to every problem and starts making decisions for its people when there is no legitimate public interest in doing so (although plenty of busybodies will invent such reasons to satisfy their need to control others), such as when it attempts to tell consenting adults what they may and may not do in their own homes.

As for income tax, it allows you a higher level of taxation over those who can handle it (that is, relatively rich people). This allows Capitalism to work, without an income tax, the ever-growing income differences will make one of the two systems collapse - the Democracy or the Capitalism. You could get the same effect from sales tax, but only if you make it progressive by different levels of taxation on different products, so basic products will be (at least, almost) tax free, and luxuries will be taxed heavily.

I imagine that here in the US, the death penalty would be more of a deterrent if the same held true. If no one was ever on death row for more than two weeks and when the execution happened it was on the front page with a picture of the body.

Not so much.

In England around 1800, picking pockets was a capital crime. (As were more than 200 other offenses.) Yet, pickpockets routinely worked the crowds at public hangings.

Time was - back in the 1600s - in Russia, you could be summarily executed for possession of tobacco. Didn't stop people from smoking.

Executions, public or not, are not a significant deterrant.

I don't know about TFA, because like most people around here I didn't bother to read it, but I do have a bit of a background in the wireless industry. And ANYTHING that ANYBODY can do to loosen the tight grip that the carriers have on our collective balls is a good thing.

Right now the carriers control what types of phones you can use on their networks. They want to lock out anything that might compete with their own content offerings. It's bad enough that Microsoft can make all their own services (MSN Search and IE come to mind) the default in Windows. Now imagine if they made it outright impossible to install other software or content that didn't come from them. Because that's what the cellular carriers do!

There is no reason that there shouldn't be a wireless version of carterfone. This document provides an interesting read into the current state of affairs. Consumers on Verizon and Sprint are screwed. AT&T and T-Mobile customers fare a little better, since they always have the option of buying unbranded/unlocked GSM phones. But even at that the carriers are attempting to impose artificial limitations -- like T-Mobile's claim (false, but they still sell this to the unwashed masses) that MyFaves won't work on a non-MyFaves phone.

All the power to Google if they can open up this market just a little bit. I won't ever be owning an ad-sponsored phone. But maybe they will bring something similar to carterfone to the market. They certainly have nothing to fear from the carriers, unlike the equipment makers (Mororola, Nokia, etc) that are afraid to speak up for fear of losing that carriers business.

'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

Abstract:
In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: I've got nothing to hide. According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

I've Got Nothing to Hide

Actually, US v. Miller said the Court had been presented no evidence that a short-barrel shotgun was useful to a militia, so they couldn't rule that it was. If that sounds like a cop-out, it was. But, no one showed up to argue for the defendant, so the government was free to present their case without opposition.

I recently read a very interesting article that explains a great deal about the back story surrounding the decision: the defendants, the district judge, the public defender, and the Supreme Court justice that authored the ruling.

The Peculiar Story of United States v. Miller

The author's conclusion: the entire episode was a set-up to 'validate' the National Firearms Act of 1934 with a precedent. But the ruling was not exactly a shining example of clear writing, leaving us to scratch our heads over its effect on subsequent gun control legislation.

It's a stupid-ass Amendment written by drooling illiterates, as far as you can tell by reading it.

It was written and re-written by the House and the Senate at the time, starting with proposals by James Madison that he derived from the constitutions of the states in the US at the time. More interesting, the Senate specifically rejected a proposal to add the clause "for the common defense" (which was in a few state constitutions at the time). If original intent counts for anything, this would conclusively reject the notion of a collective right:

The Second Amendment and the Historiography of the Bill of Rights

But, they were hardly illiterate. They just had a different perspective that you have today. One of the key words even had a different meaning that you associate with it today: "regulated" meant "properly functioning", rather than "constrained by government laws".

I recently read a paper that explained why the "Nothing to hide" response is inadequate: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =998565

The paper explains that we mean lots of different things when we talk about privacy. Also, there needs to be a balance between privacy and other community concerns. Getting this balance right is difficult.