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Online Shoppers Naive About Online Prices
smooth wombat writes "Have you ever been shopping online and noticed the difference in prices for the same item at different stores? Do you realize that not only are the prices different from store to store but they could be different for you compared to someone else who shops at the same store? Nearly 2/3 of adult internet shoppers thought that practice was illegal according to a study (pdf format) conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. First-time buyers at a retailer could see higher prices than a firm's repeat customers, and retailers may not offer discounts to consumers who buy the same brands regularly without even looking at alternative products on the same site. From the article: 'The Annenberg study was based on results from a telephone survey from Feb. 8 to March 14 of 1,500 adults who said they had used the Internet within the past 30 days. The margin of sampling error was reported to be plus or minus 2.51 percentage points.'"
Wait!
You mean to tell me that everyone doing business on the internet is not Honest?
I thought that's why I paid $1,000 for my official internet seller's card. That's ok...it's paid for. I probably shouldn't tell you, but I didn't even by a ticket, and won an international lottery in some obscure African nation. I only have to pay $10,000 to collect millions. I plan to get the $10,000 by fronting $15,000 to help out some guy from another obscure country to get his inheritence out of the country.
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
This isn't a real problem. The basic issue is that only the copyright holder has standing to litigate copyright violations. But it's never really ambiguous who the copyright holder is. The FSF recommends that free software developers assign their copyrights to the FSF, so that they can deal with violations. Many individual projects require all contributors to assign their copyrights to a consortium, to the project leader, or something similar. There are some projects with copyright held jointly by many developers, but there's almost always someone who you can point to and say "this person/organization holds copyright over the majority of the code". And even if it's not immediately obvious from the license who the copyright holder is, that doesn't matter in court; not knowing who has standing to prosecute is no defense.
Also, notice that "Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the author of the GPL, was unable to comment in time for this article." A brief interview with RMS would surely have cleared this up as a non-issue.