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Can confirm it'd be a felony in Pennsylvania. https://govt.westlaw.com/pac/D...

Microsoft has a monopoly in enterprise desktop computing. It isn't a 100% market share, but it's enough.

If it isn't 100% market share, if it's not exclusive, if there is more than one place you can get it, then by definition it's not a monopoly. You may need to revise your terms to be clearer about what you mean, as the word monopoly has a specific definition. Perhaps you mean something like "market leader", instead?

In terms of being granted a distribution monopoly, you can get a legal overview here, but while the process varies a little from State to State and the Feds get involved if it goes interstate, you can't compete in the market because the Public Utility Commission (PUC) in the State must permit your actions first and they set your prices for you. While some PUCs allow competition in generation, AFAIK, none allow actual competition in distribution.

Are you serious? The relevant PA law is referred to in the code as "WIRETAPPING AND ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE," and it explicitly covers this scenario. There doesn't need to be a wire involved.

"Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, a person is guilty of a felony of the third degree if he: (1) intentionally intercepts, endeavors to intercept, or procures any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept any wire, electronic or oral communication;"

http://weblinks.westlaw.com/re...

This is a matter of settled law. Juries and judges don't agree with you.

Citation needed.

http://store.westlaw.com/products-liability-design-manufacturing-defects-2011-2012/181671/13975067/productdetail

Westlaw http://www.westlaw.com/ lists Acts, Orders, etc with highlighted bits where stuff has been revoked, amended and replaced. I've used the Westlaw UK for my university course and it's proven quite helpful.

I'll call that bluff. Point out to me any except of the opinion that's contrary.

Here's a link: http://web2.westlaw.com/find/default.wl?fn=_top&rs=WLW8.09&rp=%2Ffind%2Fdefault.wl&mt=NewLitigator&vr=2.0&sv=Split&cite=535+F.3d+1373

If you've got the authority to make such a claim, this link should open right up for you. Since, however, you are clearly both not a lawyer and utterly wrong, I guess this settles it.

I'm not sure how the two are really comparable as rivals. LexisNexis (along with their rival in the legal profession, http://www.westlaw.com/ ) Provide excellent (as well as very expensive with searches running at over $70 per minute) coverage of court cases, codes, laws, public records, etc, which are all immensely helpful to legal types. Sure they have public records containing some personal information, but very little that isn't already available as public information (so things such as deeds, criminal records, voter registrations, etc), and it's definately not their primary focus in life.

My first thought when I read this was that Google could easily challenge Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw for their hold on the law school community in the US. While my wife was in law school I routinely helped her research cases using both of these services, and quite frankly their interface sucks. It took forever to find just about anything, and they had to continually pelt the students with free gifts just to keep them coming back. Google could potentially do very well in this area and I think there is certainly room for another competitor; especially one with Google's name recognition.

Check out WestLaw. The base data is public domain, i.e., court records. WestLaw and its competitors charge big bucks, though, for collecting it, cross-referencing it, plugging in who cites what it in their cases, which rulings have been overturned or or narrowed by later case law, etc.

In the case of the National Electrical Code, the situation is reversed. A private organization codifies "best practices" for its membership in a number of areas, and publishes these as copyrighted works, available to those members. It also makes those available to the general public, although at what some consider an inflated price. The NEC and other "reference publications" of the National Fire Prevention Association aren't laws or regulations themselves. And they don't start out in the public domain.

It's when every damn little town in America (that includes the U.S. and Canada) uses those publications as references within their laws that things get sticky. If they wrote their own regulations, THOSE should be in the public domain, but they usually don't. Should the private organization lose its rights because the city council of Balderdash Springs votes to "incorporate, by reference, the standards of the [insert year here] National Electical Code" into its building codes, rather than writing their own set? I don't think so. But, this may be a case in which having a (reasonably) consistant national standard for compliance would override the interests of the copyright holder...

If you're a fellow old man like me, then I gotta tell you. Lighten up. You're making the kids who work for you miserable. As for responsibilities, I'm a consultant to one enterprise, a partner in another, and a teacher on top of it because hanging out with no one but other old farts in suits makes me feel old. I got a handful of kids who call me "Dad," and a roomful more who refer to me as "Uncle," so if you're looking for "professional" "responsibility," I've got so much I'll gladly lend you some of mine.

Perhaps you don't understand that the company officers (i.e. the directors) wear liability (incl. criminal) for the actions of the employees:

Here's Westlaw. Find me the cites. Here's CNN. Find me ANY corporate officer who's done time for the actions of their employees in the past fifty years. Feel free to include the terms "Enron," "Union Carbide," and "Exxon Valdez" in your search.

when the directors are sued in a class action because of an employee of theirs that used a personal phone during work hours to cause a negligent loss of profits, then that's okay - hardly!).

Son, I'd like to invite you to come picnic with the rest of us back in the soft green fields of Reality.

Look, you sound like you just got promoted to Head Assistant Manager of the Whole Sporting Goods Department down at the KMart. Does the name "Maj. Frank Burns" ring a bell with you? If you're half as old as you claim to be, it should.

Lighten up. Rent "Seabiscuit" and watch it twice, and that includes the "Making Of Featurette." People don't run their best when you're cracking whips over their heads. Call a seance and ask Uday Hussein about that if you don't believe me.

My people are glad to see me come in, because they know "the boss" can solve their problem. I get good information because no one's afraid to tell me the truth, and I get TIMELY information because no one's afraid about covering their butts when things don't go our way. Sure, my people work for me, but more importantly, they work WITH me.

If you find you're having to threaten more than you inspire, then chances are you're a fairly lousy manager. And if you think that the answer to your company's bottom line is taking away a cell phone from some single mother who works for you, then I'd suggest you start thinking about cutting the payroll at your job.

This has nothing to do with the NY Times. All of the Times' articles in their database are copyrighted; you can't reproduce them without consent.

This bill is intended to protect compilations of non-copyrightable material such as, oh say, court opinions and statutes, like Westlaw and LexisNexis.

Interestingly enough, Thompson-West--though they can't copyright the opinions themselves--claims copyright on the page numbers of their bound volumes of the Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, and other series of publications which all contain court opinions from various jurisdictions (they're typically the only place in which hard copies of opinions are actually published), thus stopping competitors from digitizing these books (with internal, citable page numbers in them) and creating their own databases. See Who owns the Law?

The acutal case is Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l, 241 F.3d 398 (5th Cir. 2001). (Link is to Findlaw version.)

Well, they don't own the copyright to the actual case law, but they have contracts to be the sole publisher for court documents. They then intermix the public domain case law with their own works so that it is extremely hard to seperate their copyrighted additions from the rest. You want to practice law? You will end up paying yearly fees to these companies. The courts see this as a big plus because they don't have to publish this stuff themselves and no tax dollars are spent.