The law lists a fixed amount of statutory damage per infringement. So their calculations are correct.
The judge says you're wrong. See page 3 (PDF page 4) of the ruling.
an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just.
It has long been held that statutory damages apply once for each work infringed. The 13 record companies argued that the word 'or' applied three commas back rather than applying to the comma immediately preceding the word. The record companies argued that when two or more people are involved the $750 to $30,000 award applied to each copy rather than each work.
If you continue to the last paragraph on page 5 of the PDF you will see the judge rejected that interpretation. The judge found that the actual number of copies was a key factor influencing where the award would fall in the $750 to $30,000 range. The part after the word 'or' simply means that when two or more people infringe together they share responsibility rather than having a separate damage award against each of them.
The record companies even put forth the judge's interpretation throughout most of the litigation. They didn't ask for damages per copy until they hired a new law firm in September 2010, some four months after the court granted summary judgment.
With the judge's interpretation, damages would be somewhere between $7.5 million and $1.5 billion. That is still astonishingly high but nowhere near the $75 trillion the record companies were asking for.
Rebuttal from Physicians for Social Responsibility
I was going to mod this up but decided to respond instead*. The Physicians for Social Responsibility has a tagline of "United States Affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War". Which raises serious questions about their credibility.
*It should probably be modded up anyway just for its alternative perspective.
Not surprisingly there are a lot of negative comments here, but to play devil's advocate: what practices of Microsoft's are really unethical?
Lying to IBM about having an OS ready. Bill Gates later bragged about this in his 1995 book.
Setting up contracts with vendors that required them to buy Windows licenses for every machine they sell even if the machine did not come with Windows.
Making their apps use hidden APIs that worked while leaving competing products to use published APIs that were buggy.
Using a fabricated video during the anti-trust trial to make it look like IE could not be removed from the OS.
Bribing other companies to join a standards body and push their complex, unvetted standard through.
'Donating' to a bunch of Attorneys General campaings which were then followed up with generous settlement offers after the states had already won their case.
'Donating' $100,000 to the George W. Bush inaugural party which was followed up with a generous settlement offer after the DOJ had already won their case.
Spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) about the competition has long been a standard Microsoft business practice.
Paying SCO some $50 million dollars through foreign back channels (BayStar) while SCO was spreading FUD about Linux.
Those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are many, many more.
If you are so certain of that, perhaps you should buy up all the helium you can afford, hold onto it for two years, and sell it to scientists at a massive profit in 2013.
what are these bought and paid for decisions? Bought for by how much? There is an argument to be made for justices improperly resolving ambiguity to their own personal preferences, but bought? Show me.
encrypt the data before writing. at no point in its existence will it appear anything but white noise to unauthorized parties.
--
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Your statement is very ironic in light of your signature. Oh, I'm sorry, that was just a random number you posted.
Hell, looking back at history the same thing happened even with radio!
Speaking of history, we can't let children learn of the atrocities that have occurred over the past couple thousand years. That would give impressionable young minds ideas which will lead them to repeat the worst acts mankind has ever seen.
Kids may decide they want to be like Edward I who had traitors hanged, drawn, and quartered. They may decide to have some women burned at the stake. They may fancy themselves slave masters who capture negros and turn them into personal servants. Perhaps they will catapult diseased bodies into a city like Genghis Khan.
We must ban the teaching of history to prevent the moral decay or our children.
Now it is hidden in a remote and classified location--1,860 miles down the railroad track, outside on a slab of concrete in the northeastern part of the country, in 60 casks each the size of a railroad car. Don't worry, nobody will find it there.
The constitution is the foundation upon which the US government operates. People really should read it. It isn't very long. The entire thing, with all 27 amendments is hand-written on four pieces of paper.
Separation of church and state was stated to prevent congress from enacting law which would prevent or otherwise curtail the freedom of people practicing religion; it was not a statement which would prevent religion from being practiced in such things as school, or any other government-backed organization
The first amendment has two clauses relating to religion. First is the establishment clause. Its purpose is to keep the government from proselytizing or otherwise pushing a particular religion upon the people.
The second is the exercise clause which, as you have indicated, is to prevent the government from interfering with people's religion.
The phrase "separation of church and state" was coined by Thomas Jefferson when he described how these two clauses, taken together, are intended to create a wall of separation between church and state:
I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
Prior to the civil war this was not especially controversial. It wasn't until the 14th amendment was ratified that it became a major concern. The 14th amendment made the first amendment (and all other rights) apply at the state level as well as the federal. Prior to the 14th amendment it was commonplace for schools to intermingle with religion.
Most people think that separation of church and state is a hard piece of legislation, which it is not.
I don't know anyone who thinks that. Most people realize that it is in the constitution which is much more solid than a 'hard' piece of legislation.
To think that decisions made within state are made without religious bias is naive and those who seek firm separation really don't understand the implications of that.
The first amendment has nothing to do with government employees having personal religious beliefs and biases. The rest of your post is based upon this fundamental misunderstanding.
Perhaps that lack of clarity is why the constitution does not succinctly state "separation of church and state", but rather spells it out with two separate clauses.
I don't know what the relevant difference is between Texas and North Dakota
Crime correlates with temperature. North Dakota is much colder than Texas. Not that I disagree with your post. It's just that North Dakota and Texas are not really the best comparison.
North Dakota, in contrast, has one of the lowest murder rates in the US, and has never employed the practice of killing convicted murderers.
North Dakota executed eight people from 1880 to 1905. They repealed the death penalty in 1915.
You need to be able to publish your stuff in academia as fast as possible, once you have good results. Waiting for the patent filing process (just the filing) can delay it badly. If you have first to invent, you can do your invention, then publish while you are doing the patent filing.
This will cripple innovation in America's Universities as researchers are forced to choose between publishing and patenting.
The crippling started when Universities started filing for patents in the first place. The purpose of a patent is to encourage people to disclose the secrets behind their inventions. A key objective of academic research is to share research results with the world. If academics are declining to publish because they are too busy filing for a patent, then the patent system is doing the opposite of what it is supposed to do.
Now we need to think in energy, so we need to use E = 1/2 mV^2. Or in other words we need to compare the square of the velocities. 300^2/11000^2 = 0.00074 or about 0.075% of the energy required.
The big problem with rockets is that the fuel has to travel with the vessel. I haven't done the math but I have heard roughly half of the fuel is spent accelerating the other half to the speed of sound. If you have a land-based system that accelerates the vessel to the speed of sound you can make the vessel half the size (or replace half the fuel with payload).
Speaking of the fuel, most of the weight comes from the oxidizer. With a hydrogen-oxygen rocket you need one oxygen atom for every two hydrogen. Oxygen has an atomic weight of 16 while hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1. So 89% (16/18) of the mass is oxygen.
Imagine if you had a railgun that accelerates a ram-jet past the speed of sound, the ram-jet burns oxygen from the air and accelerates to nearly orbital velocity, finally a rocket takes over to reach orbit. If we could get that working we would have much better access to space.
It is worth noting Burt Rutan uses a mother ship to launch his space craft. The mother ship gets up to speed by burning oxygen from the air in standard jet engines. The spacecraft then drops off and launches with a substantial head start.
I'm eager to see how this gets settled. I'm betting AT&T will offer a discount to any customer that wants to renew their service by signing up for another two year contract. Oh, and the law firm behind this suit will get $30 million.
If you wanted to get me out into the streets, cutting off the internet would be the way to do it. Not so much complaining about tyranny, but because I'm no longer wasting the day watching videos of other people's cats.
Agreed. Not because I would have been watching videos of other peoples' cats (what an odd fetish), but because I would have wasted my time reading about other people going out and protesting.
This is the second post in a row where you have exhibited horrible grammar. The first letter of every sentence along with all proper nouns and acronyms should be capitalized.
The word 'are' is a form of 'be', meaning to exist. You meant to write 'our', as in, belongs to us.
You should really use a web browser with built-in spell checking which would have caught most of your spelling errors.
Sadly it IS constitutional, hell just about anything the feds want to do is allowed now thanks to the way they've perverted the Commerce Clause.
By far, the most common use of the internet is speech protected by the first amendment. The commerce clause does not override the first amendment.
...not that the first amendment will stop congress from passing the law, the President from invoking it, or the courts from arguing over the terms strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, content-specific, compelling state interest, etc.
If he abused his access privileges then it is not 'authorized use'. The laws are against unauthorized use.
A similar issue came up in the United States in 2008. Lori Drew was prosecuted for violating the MySpace terms of use when she logged in with an alias, which meant accessing MySpace computers in "excess of authorized use"*. The jury convicted her. The judge threw out the conviction for the reasons mentioned by other posters along with the idea that the law would be unconstitutionally vague because there would be a lack of guidance for law enforcement and a lack of notice to the public.
*The case was heavily covered on Slashdot. Drew's reasons for accessing the system were highly unethical but not illegal at the time, so the prosecutor decided to get creative and charge her with exceeding the level of authorization granted by the terms of use.
How do you charge a non citizen for treason? You would think you would have to be a citizen to 'betray' the country.
John Brown was tried for treason against the state of Virginia. His lawyer argued that Brown could not be found guilty of treason against a state to which he owed no loyalty and was not a resident of. Nevertheless he was convicted and executed.
Something tells me the US government is not going to make a distinction about Assange's citizenship. They will, however have to address the requirements spelled out in the constitution to convict someone of treason. To convict the government must present two witnesses to the same overt act or Assange must confess in open court.
Slashdot Mirror
The judge says you're wrong. See page 3 (PDF page 4) of the ruling.
It has long been held that statutory damages apply once for each work infringed. The 13 record companies argued that the word 'or' applied three commas back rather than applying to the comma immediately preceding the word. The record companies argued that when two or more people are involved the $750 to $30,000 award applied to each copy rather than each work.
If you continue to the last paragraph on page 5 of the PDF you will see the judge rejected that interpretation. The judge found that the actual number of copies was a key factor influencing where the award would fall in the $750 to $30,000 range. The part after the word 'or' simply means that when two or more people infringe together they share responsibility rather than having a separate damage award against each of them.
The record companies even put forth the judge's interpretation throughout most of the litigation. They didn't ask for damages per copy until they hired a new law firm in September 2010, some four months after the court granted summary judgment.
With the judge's interpretation, damages would be somewhere between $7.5 million and $1.5 billion. That is still astonishingly high but nowhere near the $75 trillion the record companies were asking for.
I was going to mod this up but decided to respond instead*. The Physicians for Social Responsibility has a tagline of "United States Affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War". Which raises serious questions about their credibility.
*It should probably be modded up anyway just for its alternative perspective.
Making their apps use hidden APIs that worked while leaving competing products to use published APIs that were buggy.
Those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are many, many more.
How much of that personal information was real and how much was made up?
If you are so certain of that, perhaps you should buy up all the helium you can afford, hold onto it for two years, and sell it to scientists at a massive profit in 2013.
Are you saying it is okay for Thomas to accept a bribe if it ultimately did not affect the outcome?
Seven days before issuing a ruling in Eldred v Ashcroft, Clarence Thomas accepted a seven-figure advance from Harper Collins on his memoirs.
Excellent. When is Python going to add start and stop delimiters for blocks of code?
DVDs from ten years ago still work, even in the latest and greatest BluRay players.
Alright, what are they?
Your statement is very ironic in light of your signature. Oh, I'm sorry, that was just a random number you posted.
In other words, it confirms nothing.
Speaking of history, we can't let children learn of the atrocities that have occurred over the past couple thousand years. That would give impressionable young minds ideas which will lead them to repeat the worst acts mankind has ever seen.
Kids may decide they want to be like Edward I who had traitors hanged, drawn, and quartered. They may decide to have some women burned at the stake. They may fancy themselves slave masters who capture negros and turn them into personal servants. Perhaps they will catapult diseased bodies into a city like Genghis Khan.
We must ban the teaching of history to prevent the moral decay or our children.
Now it is hidden in a remote and classified location--1,860 miles down the railroad track, outside on a slab of concrete in the northeastern part of the country, in 60 casks each the size of a railroad car. Don't worry, nobody will find it there.
The first amendment has two clauses relating to religion. First is the establishment clause. Its purpose is to keep the government from proselytizing or otherwise pushing a particular religion upon the people.
The second is the exercise clause which, as you have indicated, is to prevent the government from interfering with people's religion.
The phrase "separation of church and state" was coined by Thomas Jefferson when he described how these two clauses, taken together, are intended to create a wall of separation between church and state:
Prior to the civil war this was not especially controversial. It wasn't until the 14th amendment was ratified that it became a major concern. The 14th amendment made the first amendment (and all other rights) apply at the state level as well as the federal. Prior to the 14th amendment it was commonplace for schools to intermingle with religion.
I don't know anyone who thinks that. Most people realize that it is in the constitution which is much more solid than a 'hard' piece of legislation.
The first amendment has nothing to do with government employees having personal religious beliefs and biases. The rest of your post is based upon this fundamental misunderstanding.
Perhaps that lack of clarity is why the constitution does not succinctly state "separation of church and state", but rather spells it out with two separate clauses.
Crime correlates with temperature. North Dakota is much colder than Texas. Not that I disagree with your post. It's just that North Dakota and Texas are not really the best comparison.
North Dakota executed eight people from 1880 to 1905. They repealed the death penalty in 1915.
The crippling started when Universities started filing for patents in the first place. The purpose of a patent is to encourage people to disclose the secrets behind their inventions. A key objective of academic research is to share research results with the world. If academics are declining to publish because they are too busy filing for a patent, then the patent system is doing the opposite of what it is supposed to do.
The big problem with rockets is that the fuel has to travel with the vessel. I haven't done the math but I have heard roughly half of the fuel is spent accelerating the other half to the speed of sound. If you have a land-based system that accelerates the vessel to the speed of sound you can make the vessel half the size (or replace half the fuel with payload).
Speaking of the fuel, most of the weight comes from the oxidizer. With a hydrogen-oxygen rocket you need one oxygen atom for every two hydrogen. Oxygen has an atomic weight of 16 while hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1. So 89% (16/18) of the mass is oxygen.
Imagine if you had a railgun that accelerates a ram-jet past the speed of sound, the ram-jet burns oxygen from the air and accelerates to nearly orbital velocity, finally a rocket takes over to reach orbit. If we could get that working we would have much better access to space.
It is worth noting Burt Rutan uses a mother ship to launch his space craft. The mother ship gets up to speed by burning oxygen from the air in standard jet engines. The spacecraft then drops off and launches with a substantial head start.
I'm eager to see how this gets settled. I'm betting AT&T will offer a discount to any customer that wants to renew their service by signing up for another two year contract. Oh, and the law firm behind this suit will get $30 million.
Agreed. Not because I would have been watching videos of other peoples' cats (what an odd fetish), but because I would have wasted my time reading about other people going out and protesting.
This is the second post in a row where you have exhibited horrible grammar. The first letter of every sentence along with all proper nouns and acronyms should be capitalized.
The word 'are' is a form of 'be', meaning to exist. You meant to write 'our', as in, belongs to us.
You should really use a web browser with built-in spell checking which would have caught most of your spelling errors.
By far, the most common use of the internet is speech protected by the first amendment. The commerce clause does not override the first amendment.
...not that the first amendment will stop congress from passing the law, the President from invoking it, or the courts from arguing over the terms strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, content-specific, compelling state interest, etc.
A similar issue came up in the United States in 2008. Lori Drew was prosecuted for violating the MySpace terms of use when she logged in with an alias, which meant accessing MySpace computers in "excess of authorized use"*. The jury convicted her. The judge threw out the conviction for the reasons mentioned by other posters along with the idea that the law would be unconstitutionally vague because there would be a lack of guidance for law enforcement and a lack of notice to the public.
*The case was heavily covered on Slashdot. Drew's reasons for accessing the system were highly unethical but not illegal at the time, so the prosecutor decided to get creative and charge her with exceeding the level of authorization granted by the terms of use.
Care to back that up with some evidence?
John Brown was tried for treason against the state of Virginia. His lawyer argued that Brown could not be found guilty of treason against a state to which he owed no loyalty and was not a resident of. Nevertheless he was convicted and executed.
Something tells me the US government is not going to make a distinction about Assange's citizenship. They will, however have to address the requirements spelled out in the constitution to convict someone of treason. To convict the government must present two witnesses to the same overt act or Assange must confess in open court.