I should have added: there *IS* one way for the Federal government to do it, and do it Constitutionally: amend the Constitution. But unless and until they do, this will fail. Maybe not immediately, but it will fail. They are opening a can of worms that they do not seem to understand.
"This tax would be collected from the retailer, just like a normal sales tax, not from the end purchaser. Technically, at least a few states already require you to pay a "usage" tax on things bought online or over the phone (from out-of-state), but that requires the purchaser to pay the tax, not the seller, so it ends up not being paid. Thats why the states want to go after the retailers: because then it becomes much easier for the state to enforce the taxes, which they currently cannot. "
There is only one problem with this. Wait! Actually, there are four. Pardon the long tweet, but this is not the simplest issue and people REALLY should get these things through their heads.
(1) Not a big issue, but all, or nearly all, states have "use" (not usage) taxes. It isn't just a few.
(2) A state cannot legally tax a transaction that occurs in another state. This has always been true, and continues to be true. There are court rulings galore, as well as centuries-old common law.
(3) The Federal government has no Constitutional authority to collect taxes on behalf of a state. See (2) above. This too has always been true.
(4) When a financial transaction takes place, it is deemed to have occurred AT THE PLACE OF BUSINESS.
Now let's look at how these 4 things fit together, with the result that Congress is full of shit for trying to do this:
Number (4) was decided in the courts WAY over 100 years ago, closer now to 200 I think, in response to mail-order companies. There are 2 salient points here: (A) for various reasons, among them taxes, the transaction HAS to take place somewhere, and (B) where does it make the most sense?
Well, it was decided for many good reasons that the transaction takes place at the location of the company, rather than the location of the buyer. Some of those reasons are: it is far easier to keep track of a company's transactions for tax purposes than it is to try to keep track of every individual; and it simply doesn't work the other way around: if the transaction took place at the customer's location, how would the company know how much to tax? Is it reasonable to expect them to know all the tax laws for every state, county, and city in the whole country? The answer, even today, is NO.
That is why you can be taxed if the company has a physical presence in your state: then it can reasonably be argued that the transaction took place in that state.
Are we straight so far?
So now we run into point (2). If you are in New York and you buy via internet from a company that is (only) in California, the state of New York cannot legally tax that transaction, because it took place in California. That is where Use Taxes come in: most states have them, and they are just about always the same rate as sales taxes. So New York can charge the customer a Use Tax. There are 2 differences: it is the use of the item that is being taxed, not the transaction, which makes it legal; and the individual is responsible for keeping track of and paying the taxes. It has to be that way, because again the company has no practical way to do it.
In practice (and this is the biggest bitch by the states), people don't keep track and don't pay. And in fact, many people don't even realize a use tax exists, unless they buy something big in another state (like a car) and the state dings them for it. But that's beside the point, because it's the ONLY legal form of taxation that the courts have allowed them.
And then we run into point (3). The Constitution does not give Congress or the Federal government the power to collect sales taxes on behalf of the states.
So, while it might be slightly more complicated than this, that's it in a nutshell. The Federal government has no legal power to do what they are trying to do. They've tried to do it in the past, too, without success. There is simply no way around those 3 points (the first one being mostly irrelevant).
"You can't be late on your mortgage payment because your credit card was stolen and/or used for unauthorized purchases because you are using THEIR money, not yours. "
Wrong. You aren't looking at all the circumstances. If your card is stolen just BEFORE a mortgage payment is due, and you report it stolen, you can't make more charges on it. And how long does it take to get a new one?
I won't debate here the wisdom of making mortgage payments with a credit card. That's another matter entirely.
I'm not trying to troll. But I really have to disagree with this.
"30% is cheap for not having to bother with infrastructure, payment processing, refunds, tech support when the OS messes up breaking your app and a myriad other small bits and pieces which add up to a lot of time spent."
No, it isn't. Not today.
"Infrastructure" consists of a website, and informing the info sites of your product.
"Payment processing" is 2.9% (to start) + $0.30 per transaction on PayPal. Very far from 30%.
"Building and maintaining infrastructure..."
... is almost completely unnecessary.
"... payment processing is time consuming and expensive..."
No, it's not. With modern merchant systems it is cheap and almost effortless. (PayPal, Stripe, etc., etc.)
"In fact, it is a value loss, since the convenience of app store purchases is high value for the buyer."
"High value"???
I can barely stand the (Mac) App Store. It's slow, it's poorly conceived and poorly executed, it has far too many bugs, and it is too self-serving and promotional. In addition, their approval process for apps is slow, arbitrary, and capricious. The App Store is primarily high value for Apple and its lock-ins, not customers. 30% for all that crap is highway robbery. If I were a developer (I am) working on the App Store (I am not), I would be very embarrassed to be associated with the final product.
More and more OS X and iOS developers have been shunning the App Store, and they aren't crazy. They have actual reasons for doing it.
Repeat: I did NOT claim that the probability of error was found by multiplying the individual probabilities together. That is a mis-reading of my statement, and I even expanded on that later. (However, the end probability *IS* the result of a product, not a sum. And yes, that is statistics.) So why do you continue to insist I was in error?
Repeat: do you refute the calculations I gave in the example?
Repeat: you are nitpicking about semantics to a ridiculous degree.
Repeat: Why do you insist on so consistently being such a gaping asshole? Repeat: That is why I want nothing to do with you.
" I'm mostly objecting to your choice of example, implying that creating unlicensed copies of a purchased (but copyrighted) work should be legal just because you bought one copy and are therefore allowed to "do whatever you want with it"."
I did not "imply" that, I simply left any mention of it out. I didn't state it explicitly in this comment because I am averse to repeating myself. But I know that restrictions on copying still exist. In a reply to someone else I wrote "copyright law still prevents you from distributing copies without permission", or words to that effect.
But it is copyright law doing the restricting, not some shrink-wrap "licensing agreement".
"Um... copyright does prohibit making (unlicensed) copies of software, just as it prohibits making unlicensed copies of books, paintings, musical recordings, and so on."
Perhaps I should have been more clear. My point was that the First Sale Doctrine limits that "licensing" to either prior contractual agreement, or the first sale. If you don't have a prior agreement, a copyright holder has no power to impose restrictions on use after that sale. They can SAY SO all they like, but it has no force of law. You bought it; it's yours.
The difference is that government (for the most part, anyway) isn't "sneaking". They're looking you right in the eye and taking your money. That's a particular kind of theft, called "robbery".
This is not to say that government isn't sneaking. They have done plenty of that. But they're taking your money pretty openly.
There are also private fire protection "cooperatives" in some communities that have no ties to other government at all. And there are also entirely private fire protection companies (not quite the same thing), again with no ties to government.
In those situations, if you aren't a member of the coop or a customer of the company, they will often gladly watch your house burn down. It's good advertising.
"Why Facebook was thrown into the mix I really have no idea because it is against their registration policy for anyone under 13 to have an account on there. Not that that stops those kids but it does give Facebook a bit of protection."
Nothing personal, but this illustrates the lack of knowledge that many people have about how this all works.
Facebook tracks the IPs of every visitor to every site that has a Facebook "like" button on it. You don't have to be using Facebook, or even have a Facebook account.
Then, they link up that IP, and information about the site, to whatever other data they have on that IP. And you'd be surprised what you can tell using that information: your name, who your friends are, what you like, your political preferences, and much, much more.
And it's not just Facebook. Other companies do it too. Google, LinkedIn, etc. Any site that has "like"- or "share"-type links on the site.
It is possible to block them, but simply turning off cookies or using an ad blocker does not do it.
Tell me this: how, as a parent, are you going to stop Facebook to stop tracking your child on EVERY internet page that has a "like" button?
There is no way for a site to know person X is a child or not... any way you did that would constitute tracking. So... the ONLY way to do it is to stop companies from tracking without your explicit consent.
Then parent your child all you want. Until then though, it is mostly pointless to worry about whether they are posting pictures of themselves on Facebook. I mean sure, catch the criminals who want to do weird things with children, but jail the CEOs of corporations that track them, too.
"I agree. There is no connection between piracy and music industry profits.
So now can we just stop the nonsense?"
The thing is, though, it doesn't matter if there is a cause-effect relationship, as long as the correlation holds. And we know that it has, for at least 13 years (because the first study I read about that showed this same correlation was in 2000).
We know that the correlation has held, despite changes in the laws, despite highly publicized (and abusive) lawsuits... despite everything. Study after study after study have shown that the biggest downloaders of shared files (not "pirates", which is something very different) are also the biggest purchasers of music and movies.
My initial statement is that the probability of error is multiplied. And it is. But I did NOT state that the result is found by multiplying the failure probabilities together. That is nothing more than a misreading of my statement.
I admit that "inverse" was the incorrect word to use, but I stick by my initial statement. Are you disputing the result shown in the example, or not?
Nevertheless, the law refers to the copyrighted work itself. Whether some physical object is attached to it or not. Or to put it a different way: the courts have long held that a copyrighted work is a copyrighted work, whether it is in electronic form, or embodied in the form of a book, or firmware, or bumps or holes in paper. It's still just a copyrighted work.
"So the next step for publishers will be to get you to sign an "agreement to become a customer" before you can purchase anything off them?"
A lot of software is "sold" (or leased, or licensed, or whatever they call it) to companies on a contract basis. Microsoft, for example, has annual package deals for their software on a contract basis. If you agree up front that you are going to be bound by some kind of license agreement, then that is your limit of rights, not copyright laws.
"The author can clamp it by date, making it useless with
no warning or indication of the future time bomb it holds.
This also needs to be changed, or at least part of the
VISIBLE sale agreement, not buried in the EULA."
That was part of my point: EULAs and "shrink wrap licenses" have been tried for everything under the sun before, and courts have ruled that they have absolutely no legal force... except for software. And my question is: why is, or should, software be any different? In fact it WASN'T any different, until pretty recently, when Congress made some exceptions for it. But I don't believe those exceptions should exist. Software worked just like every other copyrighted work, for close to 100 years. I don't see any valid reason to change that now.
Slashdot Mirror
"For the most part I find that only devices that have forced air cooling, aka fans, have issues with dust."
Nonsense. Anything that generates a high voltage can have problems with dust. Have you ever cleaned the interior of an old CRT-style television?
And monitors with fluorescent backlights (the majority of them until recently, and even many newer ones) generate high voltages.
I should have added: there *IS* one way for the Federal government to do it, and do it Constitutionally: amend the Constitution. But unless and until they do, this will fail. Maybe not immediately, but it will fail. They are opening a can of worms that they do not seem to understand.
"This tax would be collected from the retailer, just like a normal sales tax, not from the end purchaser. Technically, at least a few states already require you to pay a "usage" tax on things bought online or over the phone (from out-of-state), but that requires the purchaser to pay the tax, not the seller, so it ends up not being paid. Thats why the states want to go after the retailers: because then it becomes much easier for the state to enforce the taxes, which they currently cannot. "
There is only one problem with this. Wait! Actually, there are four. Pardon the long tweet, but this is not the simplest issue and people REALLY should get these things through their heads.
(1) Not a big issue, but all, or nearly all, states have "use" (not usage) taxes. It isn't just a few.
(2) A state cannot legally tax a transaction that occurs in another state. This has always been true, and continues to be true. There are court rulings galore, as well as centuries-old common law.
(3) The Federal government has no Constitutional authority to collect taxes on behalf of a state. See (2) above. This too has always been true.
(4) When a financial transaction takes place, it is deemed to have occurred AT THE PLACE OF BUSINESS.
Now let's look at how these 4 things fit together, with the result that Congress is full of shit for trying to do this:
Number (4) was decided in the courts WAY over 100 years ago, closer now to 200 I think, in response to mail-order companies. There are 2 salient points here: (A) for various reasons, among them taxes, the transaction HAS to take place somewhere, and (B) where does it make the most sense?
Well, it was decided for many good reasons that the transaction takes place at the location of the company, rather than the location of the buyer. Some of those reasons are: it is far easier to keep track of a company's transactions for tax purposes than it is to try to keep track of every individual; and it simply doesn't work the other way around: if the transaction took place at the customer's location, how would the company know how much to tax? Is it reasonable to expect them to know all the tax laws for every state, county, and city in the whole country? The answer, even today, is NO.
That is why you can be taxed if the company has a physical presence in your state: then it can reasonably be argued that the transaction took place in that state.
Are we straight so far?
So now we run into point (2). If you are in New York and you buy via internet from a company that is (only) in California, the state of New York cannot legally tax that transaction, because it took place in California. That is where Use Taxes come in: most states have them, and they are just about always the same rate as sales taxes. So New York can charge the customer a Use Tax. There are 2 differences: it is the use of the item that is being taxed, not the transaction, which makes it legal; and the individual is responsible for keeping track of and paying the taxes. It has to be that way, because again the company has no practical way to do it.
In practice (and this is the biggest bitch by the states), people don't keep track and don't pay. And in fact, many people don't even realize a use tax exists, unless they buy something big in another state (like a car) and the state dings them for it. But that's beside the point, because it's the ONLY legal form of taxation that the courts have allowed them.
And then we run into point (3). The Constitution does not give Congress or the Federal government the power to collect sales taxes on behalf of the states.
So, while it might be slightly more complicated than this, that's it in a nutshell. The Federal government has no legal power to do what they are trying to do. They've tried to do it in the past, too, without success. There is simply no way around those 3 points (the first one being mostly irrelevant).
"Timothy never proof reads. Not sure how he has this job, tbh."
He can't, by law. If someone "moderates" or alters website content that was supplied by somebody else, they become legally liable for that content.
I wouldn't edit it, either.
"It's not going to knock DRM off the web.
So why not put in a way for it to be done in a standard fashion?"
Holy crap. No, it won't "knock DRM off the web", but you are seriously naive enough to think this proposal is harmless?
Pardon me. That should have read "assets and liabilities".
"On paper I am in debt. If I sold everything I own I would be sitting on a fairly large pile. It all depends how you look at things."
You can't have a positive "fairly large pile" in total assets and also be in debt "on paper", unless you're doing your paperwork wrong.
"You can't be late on your mortgage payment because your credit card was stolen and/or used for unauthorized purchases because you are using THEIR money, not yours. "
Wrong. You aren't looking at all the circumstances. If your card is stolen just BEFORE a mortgage payment is due, and you report it stolen, you can't make more charges on it. And how long does it take to get a new one?
I won't debate here the wisdom of making mortgage payments with a credit card. That's another matter entirely.
"30% is cheap for not having to bother with infrastructure, payment processing, refunds, tech support when the OS messes up breaking your app and a myriad other small bits and pieces which add up to a lot of time spent."
No, it isn't. Not today.
"Infrastructure" consists of a website, and informing the info sites of your product.
"Payment processing" is 2.9% (to start) + $0.30 per transaction on PayPal. Very far from 30%.
"Building and maintaining infrastructure..."
... is almost completely unnecessary.
"... payment processing is time consuming and expensive..."
No, it's not. With modern merchant systems it is cheap and almost effortless. (PayPal, Stripe, etc., etc.)
"In fact, it is a value loss, since the convenience of app store purchases is high value for the buyer."
"High value"???
I can barely stand the (Mac) App Store. It's slow, it's poorly conceived and poorly executed, it has far too many bugs, and it is too self-serving and promotional. In addition, their approval process for apps is slow, arbitrary, and capricious. The App Store is primarily high value for Apple and its lock-ins, not customers. 30% for all that crap is highway robbery. If I were a developer (I am) working on the App Store (I am not), I would be very embarrassed to be associated with the final product.
More and more OS X and iOS developers have been shunning the App Store, and they aren't crazy. They have actual reasons for doing it.
Repeat: I did NOT claim that the probability of error was found by multiplying the individual probabilities together. That is a mis-reading of my statement, and I even expanded on that later. (However, the end probability *IS* the result of a product, not a sum. And yes, that is statistics.) So why do you continue to insist I was in error?
Repeat: do you refute the calculations I gave in the example?
Repeat: you are nitpicking about semantics to a ridiculous degree.
Repeat: Why do you insist on so consistently being such a gaping asshole? Repeat: That is why I want nothing to do with you.
" I'm mostly objecting to your choice of example, implying that creating unlicensed copies of a purchased (but copyrighted) work should be legal just because you bought one copy and are therefore allowed to "do whatever you want with it"."
I did not "imply" that, I simply left any mention of it out. I didn't state it explicitly in this comment because I am averse to repeating myself. But I know that restrictions on copying still exist. In a reply to someone else I wrote "copyright law still prevents you from distributing copies without permission", or words to that effect.
But it is copyright law doing the restricting, not some shrink-wrap "licensing agreement".
"Um... copyright does prohibit making (unlicensed) copies of software, just as it prohibits making unlicensed copies of books, paintings, musical recordings, and so on."
Perhaps I should have been more clear. My point was that the First Sale Doctrine limits that "licensing" to either prior contractual agreement, or the first sale. If you don't have a prior agreement, a copyright holder has no power to impose restrictions on use after that sale. They can SAY SO all they like, but it has no force of law. You bought it; it's yours.
"The spectrum of theft-taxation:"
You missed GP's point.
The difference is that government (for the most part, anyway) isn't "sneaking". They're looking you right in the eye and taking your money. That's a particular kind of theft, called "robbery".
This is not to say that government isn't sneaking. They have done plenty of that. But they're taking your money pretty openly.
I tried very hard, but I can't hear either of you.
There are also private fire protection "cooperatives" in some communities that have no ties to other government at all. And there are also entirely private fire protection companies (not quite the same thing), again with no ties to government.
In those situations, if you aren't a member of the coop or a customer of the company, they will often gladly watch your house burn down. It's good advertising.
"Why Facebook was thrown into the mix I really have no idea because it is against their registration policy for anyone under 13 to have an account on there. Not that that stops those kids but it does give Facebook a bit of protection."
Nothing personal, but this illustrates the lack of knowledge that many people have about how this all works.
Facebook tracks the IPs of every visitor to every site that has a Facebook "like" button on it. You don't have to be using Facebook, or even have a Facebook account.
Then, they link up that IP, and information about the site, to whatever other data they have on that IP. And you'd be surprised what you can tell using that information: your name, who your friends are, what you like, your political preferences, and much, much more.
And it's not just Facebook. Other companies do it too. Google, LinkedIn, etc. Any site that has "like"- or "share"-type links on the site.
It is possible to block them, but simply turning off cookies or using an ad blocker does not do it.
"-shrug- if you don't like tracking, block the cookies. If you don't like Facebook don't have a Facebook account. If you don't like ads use adblock."
Shows what you know about it. Most tracking doesn't involve cookies. Do you really understand how this stuff works? I think probably not.
"Why would I care if Facebook is tracking on every internet page?"
You don't care that companies can track everything your child does on the internet?
That's your choice, but I'm glad I don't live near you.
Tell me this: how, as a parent, are you going to stop Facebook to stop tracking your child on EVERY internet page that has a "like" button?
There is no way for a site to know person X is a child or not... any way you did that would constitute tracking. So... the ONLY way to do it is to stop companies from tracking without your explicit consent.
Then parent your child all you want. Until then though, it is mostly pointless to worry about whether they are posting pictures of themselves on Facebook. I mean sure, catch the criminals who want to do weird things with children, but jail the CEOs of corporations that track them, too.
"I agree. There is no connection between piracy and music industry profits.
So now can we just stop the nonsense?"
The thing is, though, it doesn't matter if there is a cause-effect relationship, as long as the correlation holds. And we know that it has, for at least 13 years (because the first study I read about that showed this same correlation was in 2000).
We know that the correlation has held, despite changes in the laws, despite highly publicized (and abusive) lawsuits... despite everything. Study after study after study have shown that the biggest downloaders of shared files (not "pirates", which is something very different) are also the biggest purchasers of music and movies.
You are nitpicking to an extraordinary degree.
My initial statement is that the probability of error is multiplied. And it is. But I did NOT state that the result is found by multiplying the failure probabilities together. That is nothing more than a misreading of my statement.
I admit that "inverse" was the incorrect word to use, but I stick by my initial statement. Are you disputing the result shown in the example, or not?
"But what's really scary is 3 dissenting opinions on what should have been a clear-cut slam-dunk 9-0."
So true.
Nevertheless, the law refers to the copyrighted work itself. Whether some physical object is attached to it or not. Or to put it a different way: the courts have long held that a copyrighted work is a copyrighted work, whether it is in electronic form, or embodied in the form of a book, or firmware, or bumps or holes in paper. It's still just a copyrighted work.
"So the next step for publishers will be to get you to sign an "agreement to become a customer" before you can purchase anything off them?"
A lot of software is "sold" (or leased, or licensed, or whatever they call it) to companies on a contract basis. Microsoft, for example, has annual package deals for their software on a contract basis. If you agree up front that you are going to be bound by some kind of license agreement, then that is your limit of rights, not copyright laws.
"The author can clamp it by date, making it useless with no warning or indication of the future time bomb it holds.
This also needs to be changed, or at least part of the VISIBLE sale agreement, not buried in the EULA."
That was part of my point: EULAs and "shrink wrap licenses" have been tried for everything under the sun before, and courts have ruled that they have absolutely no legal force... except for software. And my question is: why is, or should, software be any different? In fact it WASN'T any different, until pretty recently, when Congress made some exceptions for it. But I don't believe those exceptions should exist. Software worked just like every other copyrighted work, for close to 100 years. I don't see any valid reason to change that now.