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Lexmark's DMCA-Abuse Case Coming To An End
Adama writes "Lexmark is dead in the water with their hopes to use the DMCA to force their customers to buy their over-priced toner. Their request for another hearing has been denied. Ars has
an especially great write-up on this." (See this earlier story for more background on Lexmark's lock-in attempt.)
DMCA needs to go away, government regulation = bad.
One of my sources just forwarded me a copy of a rather intriguing document about InsideTheAsylum. In the remainder of this letter, I plan to summarize the contents of that document in an effort to identify, challenge, defy, disrupt, and, finally, destroy the institutions that deploy enormous resources in a war of attrition against helpless citizens. Let's start with my claim that if I had my druthers, InsideTheAsylum would never have had the opportunity to engage in an endless round of finger pointing. As it stands, I am completely shocked and entirely appalled that InsideTheAsylum could voice the classes of gross lies and historical misrepresentations that he so often does. There's nothing controversial about that view. It's a fact, pure and simple. It was a fact long before anyone realized that InsideTheAsylum is thoroughly ribald. We all are, to some extent, but he sets the curve. You should never forget the three most important facets of InsideTheAsylum's stratagems, namely their shabby origins, their internal contradictions, and their tendentious nature. InsideTheAsylum has vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Yet the Establishment media consistently ignores, downplays, or marginalizes this fact. Will someone please explain to me what it is in our lives that can possibly make someone trivialize certain events that are particularly special to us all? Because I certainly have no idea. Lest I forget to mention this later, he is locked into his present course of destruction. He does not have the interest or the will to change his fundamentally feral memoranda. That's our situation today, in very rough outline. Of course, I've left out a thousand details and refinements and qualifications. I've not mentioned that your support of my utterances is an ideal way to tell pathological sad sacks just what you think of their nonsense. And I've ignored neopaganism altogether. I've simply pointed out one key fact: We are being insidiously, conspiratorially, and treasonously led by deception, by bribery, by coercion, and by fear to vandalize our neighborhoods.
Either solely functional data is copyrightable, or the GPL is worthless. You cannot have it both ways. Congress made this absolutely clear when they explicitly extended copyright to software. (There having been several court decisions that all software was public domain.) Given that, the applicability of the DMCA is crystal clear.
Ya gotta love /.'s hysterical tabloid title. This ain't abuse of the DMCA, folks. Lexmark is using it exactly as intended.
Your post makes them look like they care, but they're just another big company that's worried about image, nothing more. They, for instance, use vegetable oil but they still FLAVOR their fries with animal lard. They never admitted that until someone found that out and sued them over it.
So? What's wrong with using animal lard for flavoring? All that's important is the nutritional content; using too much lard was bad, so they switched to frying in vegetable oil, but kept a little lard for flavoring. What's the big deal?
Maybe if you're some moron who thinks that eating anything made from animals is somehow bad, you'd care, but then why would a person like that eat at a restaurant famous for hamburgers?