A woman filesharing copywritten materials is in no way, shape, or form comparable to Rosa Parks, the Scopes Monkey Trial. She broke the law, got caught, and now pays the penalty. I feel that a quarter of a million is excessive, but the jury found against her.
Now, suggesting that jury nullification was remotely justified in this case by comparing it to civil rights cases is just a bit disingenuous. As the grandparent said,
The law was interpreted correctly, applied correctly, and created apparently correctly. The case was judged in a fair and equitable manner. Just because you don't like it is irrelevant.
This woman's civil rights were not violated. She is not the victim of a grand injustice. She distributed, according to the jury who sat for the case, copyrighted material. That is against the law. If you don't like it, run for congress and lead a movement for others to do the same. That's not a meaningless challenge, by the way. I'd like to see some people do it. It wouldn't be bad for the country at all to get some rabble-rousing slashdotters in Congress. CSPAN would get more interesting, certainly.
OK, so what does everyone mean when they say "bricked" in this story? When I say that something is bricked, I mean that it's completely non-functional and non-recoverable. In the case of Apple products, that might mean that it's a very stylish coaster. Some comments in this ongoing story, however, indicate that the iPhone is recoverable, just without the hacks that users have put into place.
I'm also having trouble understanding why people installed a manufacturer's firmware update, having hacked their firmware. What part of that idea sounded like a good idea? Wouldn't one wait for the hack of the update?
A mic in front of you at a rally gives you the right to ask a question. If you use that right to be an idiot, the people in charge of the rally have the right to ask you to leave. If you do not leave, they have the right to have you escorted out. If you continue to make a scene, the authorities called in to escort you out have the right to grab you by the arm to drag you out. If you flail about and put them at risk, they have the right to use force in excess of arm-dragging and ear-boxing to defend themselves and get you out of the building/park/situation. No police state here.
Don't confuse the right to free speech with the right to be an asshole with no limits. It doesn't give you the right to disrupt a gathering with no consequences. If this guy wanted to protest and claim that Skull & Bones was behind whatever it was he was claiming, he could have protested outside the event and made his point.
There are people out there whose pancreases (or whatever) have different DNA from the rest of their body. Several women have had very complicated maternity lawsuits in the US in which they were accused of illegally running surrogate mother businesses, because their children's DNA did not show up as being related!
I'm at work using IE6, and the Coral cache and mirrordot links are all blocked by the corporate firewall. Who's got a solution to let me get my lunchtime slashdot fix?
Would that be fair? Yeah, arguing to block an entire browser based upon a 3rd party plugin along with "demographics" makes this guy a tool, but would blocking those users who choose to block ads be a legitimate act? I can definitely see how sites who support themselves with ads either in part or in full would be a little upset about users blocking ads.
In a move destined to improved education for all our children, School Board Officials stated that teachers should use social networking sites. Said board member Bob Bobbinson, 45: "We need our children online for their educational development. Using sites such as myspace will make education 'relevant' to our young preteens. Enacting this policy will ensure that all of our young, vulnerable students will be taught how to properly create Myspace sites. With pictures. And that they'll be willing to chat with males age 40-50 posing as 18 year olds. We're doing this because we've thought of the children."
Apples to Elephants make for great headlines, but is actual apples to apples data more exciting?
According to the Article, Mac OS X is flat YTD. Well that's dull...clearly there's something else newsworthy in the article, right?
Vista is +5% YTD!! Fantastic! Amazing! Except that Microsoft as a whole (XP, 2000, Vista) is flat at 90% or so. That's pretty boring, too...
No data on the other 5% of the market, so basically this article's exciting new revelation is that nothing has changed, sharewise, in the computers surfing the net. I actually wish I'd spent my time working rather than reading that tripe...
So GW creates a website where fans upload to their creations, giving up their rights in exchange for the opportunity to be creative? Great idea! Except that German copyright law forbids fan-creators doing this. I guess GW could block german fans?
I'm not a GW defender here, but this seems to be a case of copyright law not giving enough flexibility to allow for fans to create works based on the copyrights of others.
I think it's clear, at least in your first two examples, that people *do* realize that what's good for a corporation's bottom line is not good for society as a whole. Thus our roads are public, police and fire are public, etc... There's even been something resembling a dialogue lately in the US as to whether or not health care should be privatized. As for media centers, there are plenty of arguments as to whether or not they should be public or private.
After all, who gets to decide what is "best" for society?
So let's say that the GPLv3's lawyers are correct and that they find some means by which to bring Microsoft to court over non-distributed code. They'll sue Microsoft over Copywrite violation? Use the GPL as a defense against some future patent violation case (which will likely never come as it is much more useful as a threat)? So a bunch of geeks show up to court to thinking that they've got the big guy by the tail, and Microsoft's big nasty lawyers show up planning set a precident as to what counts as distribution and maybe give the GPL a hugely public defeat.
This entire saga sounds like the GPL crowd saying, "Aha! We got Microsoft," but I'm unconvinced that the world is turning because of it. IANAL, but I think that Microsoft would LOVE to test this in court.
Of course, if they do support ODF, then they lose their vendor lock-in outright. No problem switching to OpenOffice if all your clients have Office, just send your stuff in ODF, and they can open it. This is the part of the OpenOffice argument that I never seem to understand, so perhaps someone can explain it to me. If Microsoft simply supports ODF as a file extension, doesn't MS Office remain the default office productivity suite by virtue of Excel, Powerpoint, and Word. The actual programs in OO aren't up to Microsoft's level of quality, and even if they were you need to justify retraining your excel-experienced workforce to make the switch as a company.
Just changing the last 3 letters of a filename doesn't seem to indicate a massive exodus away from Microsoft's software, and retraining a workforce seems to be a slight problem in moving away from Office.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, suggesting that jury nullification was remotely justified in this case by comparing it to civil rights cases is just a bit disingenuous. As the grandparent said,
This woman's civil rights were not violated. She is not the victim of a grand injustice. She distributed, according to the jury who sat for the case, copyrighted material. That is against the law. If you don't like it, run for congress and lead a movement for others to do the same. That's not a meaningless challenge, by the way. I'd like to see some people do it. It wouldn't be bad for the country at all to get some rabble-rousing slashdotters in Congress. CSPAN would get more interesting, certainly.
So do you!
OK, so what does everyone mean when they say "bricked" in this story? When I say that something is bricked, I mean that it's completely non-functional and non-recoverable. In the case of Apple products, that might mean that it's a very stylish coaster. Some comments in this ongoing story, however, indicate that the iPhone is recoverable, just without the hacks that users have put into place.
I'm also having trouble understanding why people installed a manufacturer's firmware update, having hacked their firmware. What part of that idea sounded like a good idea? Wouldn't one wait for the hack of the update?
A mic in front of you at a rally gives you the right to ask a question. If you use that right to be an idiot, the people in charge of the rally have the right to ask you to leave. If you do not leave, they have the right to have you escorted out. If you continue to make a scene, the authorities called in to escort you out have the right to grab you by the arm to drag you out. If you flail about and put them at risk, they have the right to use force in excess of arm-dragging and ear-boxing to defend themselves and get you out of the building/park/situation. No police state here.
Don't confuse the right to free speech with the right to be an asshole with no limits. It doesn't give you the right to disrupt a gathering with no consequences. If this guy wanted to protest and claim that Skull & Bones was behind whatever it was he was claiming, he could have protested outside the event and made his point.
And it's pretty cool! Obligatory wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimerism
There are people out there whose pancreases (or whatever) have different DNA from the rest of their body. Several women have had very complicated maternity lawsuits in the US in which they were accused of illegally running surrogate mother businesses, because their children's DNA did not show up as being related!
Operators are standing by! And they're lonely...so lonely....won't you please put down your wii for just a few minutes to call them?
Counterthought: there is such a thing as "terrorism," yet it still doesn't warrant a police state.
I'm at work using IE6, and the Coral cache and mirrordot links are all blocked by the corporate firewall. Who's got a solution to let me get my lunchtime slashdot fix?
Would that be fair? Yeah, arguing to block an entire browser based upon a 3rd party plugin along with "demographics" makes this guy a tool, but would blocking those users who choose to block ads be a legitimate act? I can definitely see how sites who support themselves with ads either in part or in full would be a little upset about users blocking ads.
In a move destined to improved education for all our children, School Board Officials stated that teachers should use social networking sites. Said board member Bob Bobbinson, 45: "We need our children online for their educational development. Using sites such as myspace will make education 'relevant' to our young preteens. Enacting this policy will ensure that all of our young, vulnerable students will be taught how to properly create Myspace sites. With pictures. And that they'll be willing to chat with males age 40-50 posing as 18 year olds. We're doing this because we've thought of the children."
Apples to Elephants make for great headlines, but is actual apples to apples data more exciting? According to the Article, Mac OS X is flat YTD. Well that's dull...clearly there's something else newsworthy in the article, right?
Vista is +5% YTD!! Fantastic! Amazing! Except that Microsoft as a whole (XP, 2000, Vista) is flat at 90% or so. That's pretty boring, too...
No data on the other 5% of the market, so basically this article's exciting new revelation is that nothing has changed, sharewise, in the computers surfing the net. I actually wish I'd spent my time working rather than reading that tripe...
So GW creates a website where fans upload to their creations, giving up their rights in exchange for the opportunity to be creative? Great idea! Except that German copyright law forbids fan-creators doing this. I guess GW could block german fans?
I'm not a GW defender here, but this seems to be a case of copyright law not giving enough flexibility to allow for fans to create works based on the copyrights of others.
I think it's clear, at least in your first two examples, that people *do* realize that what's good for a corporation's bottom line is not good for society as a whole. Thus our roads are public, police and fire are public, etc... There's even been something resembling a dialogue lately in the US as to whether or not health care should be privatized. As for media centers, there are plenty of arguments as to whether or not they should be public or private.
After all, who gets to decide what is "best" for society?
That'd be great! That way they could only do it 29 more times before they ran out of their cash on hand!
So let's say that the GPLv3's lawyers are correct and that they find some means by which to bring Microsoft to court over non-distributed code. They'll sue Microsoft over Copywrite violation? Use the GPL as a defense against some future patent violation case (which will likely never come as it is much more useful as a threat)? So a bunch of geeks show up to court to thinking that they've got the big guy by the tail, and Microsoft's big nasty lawyers show up planning set a precident as to what counts as distribution and maybe give the GPL a hugely public defeat.
This entire saga sounds like the GPL crowd saying, "Aha! We got Microsoft," but I'm unconvinced that the world is turning because of it. IANAL, but I think that Microsoft would LOVE to test this in court.
Just changing the last 3 letters of a filename doesn't seem to indicate a massive exodus away from Microsoft's software, and retraining a workforce seems to be a slight problem in moving away from Office.