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Best Buy Uses DMCA To Quash Black Friday Prices
Sethb writes "It looks like Best Buy didn't learn from Wal-Mart last year, and has now invoked the DMCA in order to prevent FatWallet from posting information about what items they will have on sale the day after Thanksgiving. Hopefully FatWallet will stand up for themselves again, and Best Buy will be laughed out of court."
Actually, the first and second posts in this thread need modded down, and most of this whole thread needs to be modded offtopic, except for the discussion on how it needs to be modded...
Ah, that old myth.
In fact, the 1773 Tea Act, which provoked the Boston Tea Party, remitted a significant English tea tax. The result was that Americans could buy British East India Company tea after the Tea Act for significantly less than they previously were being charged for either legal British tea or smuggled Dutch tea. And this cheaper tea was of generally higher quality than the Dutch tea, too.
So what was the issue? The extent of Parliamentary authority.
The small three-penny Townsend duty was left on the tea by Prime Minister Lord North as a statement of the principle that Parliament could tax the colonies, and the Tea Act granted a monopoly on the tea trade to the British East India Company.
Even though the result was higher quality and lower prices, the American colonies denied that Parliament had the right to do either. Indignation was high enough that the ships to New York and Philadelphia were ordered back to England by the local authorities, lest the ships be attacked. In Boston, the ship was brought in under guard, and got attacked. Americans continued to drink more expensive, smuggled Dutch tea (and increasingly coffee instead) rather than concede Parliamentary authority.
Americans did not revolt against Britain because of high tax rates; Parliament never imposed taxes in America even approaching those it imposed in Britain itself. They revolted because they did not accept the King-in-Parliament as the soverign authority in the colonies. While they were subjects of the King, they did not consider themselves subject to the authority of a Parliament in which they lacked representation any more than Britain was subject to the colonial legislatures in which Britain's people did not have representation.
"Even though the result was higher quality and lower prices, the American colonies denied that Parliament had the right to do either. Indignation was high enough that the ships to New York and Philadelphia were ordered back to England by the local authorities, lest the ships be attacked. In Boston, the ship was brought in under guard, and got attacked. Americans continued to drink more expensive, smuggled Dutch tea (and increasingly coffee instead) rather than concede Parliamentary authority."
Bull$hit. American colonists weren't protesting British tea for a political statement. Boston was a "den" for smugglers who made their money off smuggling the more-expensive-and-inferior Dutch tea than the British tea. When the East India Company was given a monopoly, the tea was so cheap (even with the taxes) it threatened the livelihood of the Boston smugglers as well as the wholesalers (because the British were cutting out the middlemen Wal-Mart style and the general public loved the prices). This fed into the radical "Sons of Liberty" groups who objected any taxation from Britain despite the fact that Great Britain nearly bankrupted itself defending the American colonies in the 7 Years War (French & Indian War) - and won - since the Colonial militias proved to be worthless (with the exception of "Roger's Rangers") cowards who fled the battles or left to tend to their crops. The Sons of Liberty, smugglers, and others raided British ships, beached them, and even set fire to a Royal Naval vessel. Because jury trials in Boston were made up of the peers of the smugglers (ie. smugglers themselves), the British authorities never could secure a conviction, so the British authorities circumvented the whole deal by holding the trials in Britain proper which alienated the radical colonists further (and that is why we have the right to jury trials in the Constitution today, because of smugglers). Britain was in the hole for something like 173 million pounds pre-1776 because of the 7 Years War. The Colonies got rich while paying less than 2% of their income in taxes on average, while in England, the poor and middle class were paying taxes on things like glass for windows, and on average where paying between 10% and 20% of their income. Ireland was in even worse shape tax wise than that. Then the radical colonists got mad because Britain kept soldiers in the colonies in a time of so-called peace (it was a farce because France was plotting another war to retake Canada AND the British American Colonies) in violation of English law. So the radicals harassed British troops. Today, for those that pay attention in K-12 history lessons, we learn that the nasty British even "quartered soldiers" into common peoples homes, which is a lie as well. The British had the soldiers housed in inns and made the colonial legislatures pay the tab. The inn keepers never protested and they loved the fat checks they received. The only members of the public that actually housed British soliders were Loyalist families who volunteered, unlike what they teach us in schools and what is written in the Constitution (again).
We also are taught that the colonials loyal to the Continental Congress and George Washington outnumbered the Loyalist colonists by 4/5ths. However, that is a misnomer. 73% of George Washington's Continental Army were made up of recent Irish immigrants, not long-term English and Scottish-descended British American colonists. Compare that number (the 73% which is also not counting the slaves that were also fighting in the Continental Army, something like 1% to 5%) to the 1/5th of the Colonial population who were Loyalist and fighting. That illustrates that the majority of the colonial public sat on the fences waiting for a clear victor to arrive in the struggle. They also don't tell you until at the college level in history classes that Parliament actually offered the American colonies representation in Parliament, but the various politicians sympathetic to the Sons of Liberty persuation resisted the invitation be
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Sorry, I'd never join the Young Republicans.
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