Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Blasts Google Book Deal
eldavojohn writes "With authors, scholars, the DoJ and publishers ripping apart the Google book deal, it's Microsoft's turn. They're claiming it's frankly an illegal 'joint venture' and not a settlement. According to ZDNet, Microsoft's four complaints against the deal are: 1) Future infringements are covered by the settlement, affecting the exclusive rights of absent class members for the life of their copyrights. 2) The deal gives away to Google vast rights that were not contested in the underlying litigation. The lawsuits dealt with Google's displaying brief excerpts. Instead of compromising on that infringement, the parties instead agreed to give away the rights to display entire books. 3) The publishers who negotiated this deal each have undisclosed side deals with Google, which will likely give them better terms than the class will get. 4) The publishers plan to exclude their own works from the deal. You might recall over a year ago Microsoft's own scanning effort died."
George W. Bush had directed his justice department to ignore cases of violent voter intimidation by KKK members? Hell, violent liberals already were calling him a fascist and a racist. And now we really DO have a president that is strong-arming the private sector (fascism) and directing his Attorney General to ignore voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers. And yet now liberals are silent on both matters. For all that breathless shrieking about fascism for 8 years, it turns out that fascism was what they really wanted...
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/09/inquiry-opened-about-new-black-panther-case/
I can't wait for the government to charge me for the right to choose my health care provider. It will be okay because this new form of taxation will only hurt people in the middle class forcing them to go onto the national system. There is nothing wrong with this because the government system is really good, and it's okay to force people to do things you want as long as you know it's good for them.
Except that nobody is going to choose your provider for you. Of course it's not like most people, especially the middle class get a choice anyway. You go with whoever your company has a deal with. If you get private insurance, then, in most states, you have a very limited selection of companies to choose from, and they don't even really compete because nobody, not even lawyers, can really tell you what you'll actually be covered for by reading your policy.
For all the horror stories that the right has trotted out about Canada and Europe, we've got more than our share of horror stories here at home with insurance company bean-counters denying coverage to people when they develop some serious problem, even though they've been paying for coverage for years. Or they use some technicality to drop you completely. Conveniently they never notice these little issues when you're healthy and giving them money every month. People die because of this. It's a twisted, fucked up system that rewards insurance companies for finding ways to screw people over once they need the help they've been paying for.
In the end, it doesn't matter what we think the cost is going to be, because we're already paying for people without insurance anyway. It's costing us ridiculous amounts of money for things like emergency room visits and it's not improving overall health, because by the time you're in the emergency room, things have gone too far.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Crap! Is that in one of the bills? I need to pay more attention.