Agreed, I was pretty confused by the GP's statement:
but I think we're dealing with an observation that means they can now proceed along a certain strategy for storing and retrieving bits. I don't think I would call this a breakthrough...
I'm curious what he would call a breakthrough, because that sounds like the textbook definition to me.
Perhaps not a world re-defining breakthrough, but we can have big breakthroughs and little breakthroughs, can we not?
It's possible that a true statement can be used to cause unjust injury to one's reputation (the basic definition of defamation), but it's a really hard thing to do in my opinion. So hard, in fact, that in US law the first criteria for libel or slander is that the statement be false. If it is true it can't legally be called defamation. The dictionary definition even implies that a defamatory statement will be false.
But Ripoff Report didn't say "Such and such company eats babies."
What they said was "Soandso said such and such company eats babies."
The injunction was against the original poster for his defamatory speech, but the original poster has no control over Ripoff Report, and Ripoff Report has no obligation to honor an injunction placed on someone else.
That is the essence of the court case, and why it came out the way it did.
Now if the original poster owned Ripoff Report, it would be an entirely different story.
Thanks for not reading the summary (let alone the article).
There was a court injunction involved. I don't see how that can be interpreted in any way other than a branch of the government (the court) being used to restrict free speech.
For what it's worth, the injunction wasn't even against the website, it was against the poster, so the suit was on shaky ground to start with (which is why Ripoff Report refused to take the post down in spite of the injunction - the felt it didn't apply to them, and the court agreed).
Now, here's the fun part: I, as the original poster, could (in theory) now go after the third-party site for copyright infringement for continuing to post my copyrighted post after I revoked their permission to use it, barring any agreement between the two parties that give them publishing right in perpetuity. Should I so choose, that is.
Uh... no you can't. You don't get to "revoke permission" for something you have already given them permission to publish. You can request that they remove it, but they don't have to comply. Even if there is a court order against you to remove it, they still don't have to remove it. That's the whole point of this 7th circuit decision.
By posting on their website you implicitly gave them permission to use your statement with no strings attached. You don't get to attach strings later. This is a fundamental property of the law. No backsies. It's in the Constitution.
Last but not least, specific parts of the post can be re-published as quotes by anyone and everyone. Quotation and critique are two of the biggest fair use exceptions, and they are the basis of most journalism in the first place. In other words, you can't sue anybody for saying "Soandso said X" if you did, in fact, say X. Even better, though, if your post is paraphrased they don't even have to keep the attribution - they can drop it if they want, because the content is not copyrightable, only the "creative" (I use the word loosely) arrangement of the words is copyrightable. They simply can't claim that it's exactly what you said (it can then become defamation against YOU).
I don't see your point, the injunction was against Ripoff Report, not against the defamers.
Ripoff Report absolutely has a right to publish something someone else said. The court has no right to inhibit free speech in such a way.
This is merely an extension of a previous SCOTUS decision that applied to cease and desist letters. Now, in the 7th circuit at least, the same thing applies to illegitimate court-ordered injunctions.
Since it has the strong foundation of a SCOTUS decision, it is likely this will eventually apply everywhere with or without SCOTUS intervention.
Compared to something like a nice sunset, torrential rain, or even a clear starry night, it's really not exciting.
I hope you realize someone who lives in south Florida would likely hold the exact opposite position.
It's nothing to you, but that doesn't mean it's nothing to everybody else. I find snow to be the least interesting large scale natural event myself, yet people in Mississippi scream for joy when they get snow for Christmas.
You should probably get a little perspective, and think about what people who have never seen such things might think.
I don't know if you know this, but solar storms don't correlate strongly with sun spots.
Solar flares seem to be more likely during periods of high sun spot activity, but 0 sun spots does not mean 0 solar flares. It just means it's not quite as likely.
Case in point, in August there were four large CME's associated with just one sun spot. Sun Spots are usually around when CME's occur, but they are bad predictors of such things, so I wouldn't lay down "harder" money (whatever that is).
It's hard to see them in Anchorage because of the city lights more than anything. They still show up this far south, but they are much fainter than they are up north, so they get washed out by the city's glow. Head out to Wasilla and you are much more likely to see them. (Girdwood would be great, except the horizon is dominated by the mountains so they have to come really far south in order to see them.)
In Fairbanks you can see them on a regular basis - much smaller city and much further north (Chena Hot Springs is a great spot for a winter vacation, btw).
I don't know if you know this, but people are pretty capable of jumping fences. Most highways near where pedestrians can be expected to be found with a speed limit above 50 are also well segregated from said pedestrians.
Where I live it's illegal for pedestrians to be anywhere near the high-speed sections of the highway, and I believe this is true in most places.
On that, we get "frogger?" And how does this police chief know that anyway?
Perhaps it was the fact that he and his friends were talking about playing a real-life version of frogger before hand?
In my mind, when someone talks about playing a real life version of Frogger, and then tries to run across a busy highway, I get the impression that he was playing a real life version of Frogger.
Either way, he's dumb as fuck.
Also:
Playing frogger or just trying to get across a dangerous road (which is "playing frogger" either way).
Seriously? You finish with "he was either playing Frogger or he was playing Frogger, I'd like to know which it was?"
Sympathy is reserved for people who try to do well yet forces beyond their control thwart their efforts. A guy who builds a house with his own two hands only to have it destroyed in an earthquake receives my sympathy. A guy who worked hard his whole life to build a healthy retirement, only to have it wiped out in a matter of months by irresponsible bankers and homeowners receives my sympathy.
A guy who blows half his face off playing Russian Roulette receives my disappointment that the shot wasn't fatal, not my sympathy. His wife and children might receive my sympathy, but not him.
Actually you're wrong, it's still censorship. Censorship is simply an entity in a position of authority prohibiting works it finds objectionable. Amazon certainly has authority over what Amazon sells in its store, so removing any work from the Amazon store because they find the content to be objectionable is, be definition, censorship.
However, it's only censorship imposed by the government* that is truly evil. I have the option of shopping somewhere else if I don't like Amazon's censorship policies. For most people, moving out of the country because you disagree with your government's censorship policies is not an option. Therefore the only option is to fight against censorship from within the country.
It's just like discrimination - choosing between red and blue socks is discrimination. It's even a superficial criteria for discrimination - the color of the sock - but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would tell you that discrimination between red and blue socks is evil.
Put discrimination in the context of the government, however, and the issue changes completely for specific situations (race, creed, religion, etc). There are still a lot of forms of discrimination that are just fine, even for the government. Choosing who gets to design the next big rocket, for example. Companies bid, and the government discriminates between them based on various criteria like cost, design quality, features, etc. It's a very good thing. It's only bad if the government discriminates against one of the companies for the sole reason that the project manager of said company is from Micronesia.
* Any entity that has similar authority over people would qualify, but generally only government fit the bill.
If I write a bunch of poetry and I can't get it published, is that censorship?
Yes, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing.
Choosing between red socks and blue socks is discrimination, by the way, obviously not a bad thing either. Same deal there.
Censorship is only really evil when taken into the context of an institution that has great authority over the individuals being censored. Pretty much the only institution that has that kind of authority is the government. Amazon has zero real authority over the people, but they do have some practical authority over their customers - particularly poor Kindle users.
Still, Amazon's censorship is the kind of thing you stop shopping at Amazon for, and maybe even join a movement advocating a boycott of Amazon. It's not something to pass new laws over (they would be really freakin scary laws).
For an example of what Amazon could do that would be illegal, if Amazon threatened to not carry any of a given publisher's books if they did not stop publishing certain books they found objectionable, that would run afoul of anti-trust laws. Amazon is in a position to at the very least severely damage that publisher, and they are abusing that position prevent the sale of certain books, which would be in direct competition with Amazon's books (who is also a publisher and retailer).
That would be an illegal abuse of a monopoly, and in fact that would even get a company that was not a monopoly into big legal trouble. The monopoly simply makes the potential damage much greater, and as a result the potential fines much greater.
It only works for a competing publishing company, and even then Amazon must be violating anti-trust laws.
Simply being a monopoly isn't against the law, but it does put you in a position to break laws that are much more difficult for smaller companies to break.
The oft-cited Microsoft example: Microsoft didn't run into legal trouble because they were shipping IE with Windows (at least, not in the US - the EU went way overboard IMO), they ran into legal trouble because they were coercing hardware retailers into not shipping PC's with Netscape pre-installed by threatening to revoke their contracts with MS. Because MS had sole control over who was able to purchase Windows, and because Windows was far and away the most popular OS on the market (95%+ at that time, I believe), not being able to ship Windows was a death sentence for hardware retailers. This abuse of their monopoly position to unfairly eliminate competition is illegal.
I don't see how Amazon's censorship is going to affect any of their competitors in any way (in some ways it's actually a boon to competitors, since they can say "we have it, Amazon doesn't"), so I don't see how it can run afoul of anti-trust laws. They aren't coercing anybody else into not selling these books, they are simply not selling them themselves. That's well within their rights, and if these books can't generate any interest outside of Amazon, well, that's business. Not everyone gets to be successful.
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Last I checked modern ram and modern flash were far more advanced than they were 20 years ago, even if they are based on the same basic technologies.
Did you know that CPU's still use silicon based transistors? Same basic design as was invented 50 years ago.
So what gives? Why haven't we seen any advances in CPU technology?
Oh wait, there has been a shitton of advances in CPU technology.
Agreed, I was pretty confused by the GP's statement:
but I think we're dealing with an observation that means they can now proceed along a certain strategy for storing and retrieving bits. I don't think I would call this a breakthrough...
I'm curious what he would call a breakthrough, because that sounds like the textbook definition to me.
Perhaps not a world re-defining breakthrough, but we can have big breakthroughs and little breakthroughs, can we not?
It's possible that a true statement can be used to cause unjust injury to one's reputation (the basic definition of defamation), but it's a really hard thing to do in my opinion. So hard, in fact, that in US law the first criteria for libel or slander is that the statement be false. If it is true it can't legally be called defamation. The dictionary definition even implies that a defamatory statement will be false.
But Ripoff Report didn't say "Such and such company eats babies."
What they said was "Soandso said such and such company eats babies."
The injunction was against the original poster for his defamatory speech, but the original poster has no control over Ripoff Report, and Ripoff Report has no obligation to honor an injunction placed on someone else.
That is the essence of the court case, and why it came out the way it did.
Now if the original poster owned Ripoff Report, it would be an entirely different story.
Thanks for not reading the summary (let alone the article).
There was a court injunction involved. I don't see how that can be interpreted in any way other than a branch of the government (the court) being used to restrict free speech.
For what it's worth, the injunction wasn't even against the website, it was against the poster, so the suit was on shaky ground to start with (which is why Ripoff Report refused to take the post down in spite of the injunction - the felt it didn't apply to them, and the court agreed).
Now, here's the fun part: I, as the original poster, could (in theory) now go after the third-party site for copyright infringement for continuing to post my copyrighted post after I revoked their permission to use it, barring any agreement between the two parties that give them publishing right in perpetuity. Should I so choose, that is.
Uh... no you can't. You don't get to "revoke permission" for something you have already given them permission to publish. You can request that they remove it, but they don't have to comply. Even if there is a court order against you to remove it, they still don't have to remove it. That's the whole point of this 7th circuit decision.
By posting on their website you implicitly gave them permission to use your statement with no strings attached. You don't get to attach strings later. This is a fundamental property of the law. No backsies. It's in the Constitution.
Last but not least, specific parts of the post can be re-published as quotes by anyone and everyone. Quotation and critique are two of the biggest fair use exceptions, and they are the basis of most journalism in the first place. In other words, you can't sue anybody for saying "Soandso said X" if you did, in fact, say X. Even better, though, if your post is paraphrased they don't even have to keep the attribution - they can drop it if they want, because the content is not copyrightable, only the "creative" (I use the word loosely) arrangement of the words is copyrightable. They simply can't claim that it's exactly what you said (it can then become defamation against YOU).
Your friend should sue the ex-coworker for defamation.
Sounds like an open-and-shut case.
I don't see your point, the injunction was against Ripoff Report, not against the defamers.
Ripoff Report absolutely has a right to publish something someone else said. The court has no right to inhibit free speech in such a way.
This is merely an extension of a previous SCOTUS decision that applied to cease and desist letters. Now, in the 7th circuit at least, the same thing applies to illegitimate court-ordered injunctions.
Since it has the strong foundation of a SCOTUS decision, it is likely this will eventually apply everywhere with or without SCOTUS intervention.
Compared to something like a nice sunset, torrential rain, or even a clear starry night, it's really not exciting.
I hope you realize someone who lives in south Florida would likely hold the exact opposite position.
It's nothing to you, but that doesn't mean it's nothing to everybody else. I find snow to be the least interesting large scale natural event myself, yet people in Mississippi scream for joy when they get snow for Christmas.
You should probably get a little perspective, and think about what people who have never seen such things might think.
If you were in a moderately sized city you'd never see it.
We get aurora on a regular basis here in Anchorage (southeast Alaska), but the city lights (300k people) drown out all but the strongest aurora.
You might have been able to see one if you had been out in a field in the middle of nowhere, but if you were anywhere near a big city, forget it.
I don't know if you know this, but solar storms don't correlate strongly with sun spots.
Solar flares seem to be more likely during periods of high sun spot activity, but 0 sun spots does not mean 0 solar flares. It just means it's not quite as likely.
Case in point, in August there were four large CME's associated with just one sun spot. Sun Spots are usually around when CME's occur, but they are bad predictors of such things, so I wouldn't lay down "harder" money (whatever that is).
It's hard to see them in Anchorage because of the city lights more than anything. They still show up this far south, but they are much fainter than they are up north, so they get washed out by the city's glow. Head out to Wasilla and you are much more likely to see them. (Girdwood would be great, except the horizon is dominated by the mountains so they have to come really far south in order to see them.)
In Fairbanks you can see them on a regular basis - much smaller city and much further north (Chena Hot Springs is a great spot for a winter vacation, btw).
This is a clear consequence of global warming caused by our over-reliance on fossile fuels!
I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty freaked out if it were ever possible to see the Northern lights in the southern hemisphere.
Dumbass.
Except for the fact that he was discussing it with his friends before hand, sure, you're absolutely right.
Need a better disinfectant - the guy lived.
I don't know if you know this, but people are pretty capable of jumping fences. Most highways near where pedestrians can be expected to be found with a speed limit above 50 are also well segregated from said pedestrians.
Where I live it's illegal for pedestrians to be anywhere near the high-speed sections of the highway, and I believe this is true in most places.
On that, we get "frogger?" And how does this police chief know that anyway?
Perhaps it was the fact that he and his friends were talking about playing a real-life version of frogger before hand?
In my mind, when someone talks about playing a real life version of Frogger, and then tries to run across a busy highway, I get the impression that he was playing a real life version of Frogger.
Either way, he's dumb as fuck.
Also:
Playing frogger or just trying to get across a dangerous road (which is "playing frogger" either way).
Seriously? You finish with "he was either playing Frogger or he was playing Frogger, I'd like to know which it was?"
Nope, no sympathy for dumbasses.
Sympathy is reserved for people who try to do well yet forces beyond their control thwart their efforts. A guy who builds a house with his own two hands only to have it destroyed in an earthquake receives my sympathy. A guy who worked hard his whole life to build a healthy retirement, only to have it wiped out in a matter of months by irresponsible bankers and homeowners receives my sympathy.
A guy who blows half his face off playing Russian Roulette receives my disappointment that the shot wasn't fatal, not my sympathy. His wife and children might receive my sympathy, but not him.
Please don't encourage abject stupidity.
Actually you're wrong, it's still censorship. Censorship is simply an entity in a position of authority prohibiting works it finds objectionable. Amazon certainly has authority over what Amazon sells in its store, so removing any work from the Amazon store because they find the content to be objectionable is, be definition, censorship.
However, it's only censorship imposed by the government* that is truly evil. I have the option of shopping somewhere else if I don't like Amazon's censorship policies. For most people, moving out of the country because you disagree with your government's censorship policies is not an option. Therefore the only option is to fight against censorship from within the country.
It's just like discrimination - choosing between red and blue socks is discrimination. It's even a superficial criteria for discrimination - the color of the sock - but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would tell you that discrimination between red and blue socks is evil.
Put discrimination in the context of the government, however, and the issue changes completely for specific situations (race, creed, religion, etc). There are still a lot of forms of discrimination that are just fine, even for the government. Choosing who gets to design the next big rocket, for example. Companies bid, and the government discriminates between them based on various criteria like cost, design quality, features, etc. It's a very good thing. It's only bad if the government discriminates against one of the companies for the sole reason that the project manager of said company is from Micronesia.
* Any entity that has similar authority over people would qualify, but generally only government fit the bill.
Yes, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing.
To clarify, it's censorship if the reason you can't get published is because they find your content objectionable.
It's not censorship if you can't get your poetry published because your poetry sucks.
If I write a bunch of poetry and I can't get it published, is that censorship?
Yes, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing.
Choosing between red socks and blue socks is discrimination, by the way, obviously not a bad thing either. Same deal there.
Censorship is only really evil when taken into the context of an institution that has great authority over the individuals being censored. Pretty much the only institution that has that kind of authority is the government. Amazon has zero real authority over the people, but they do have some practical authority over their customers - particularly poor Kindle users.
Still, Amazon's censorship is the kind of thing you stop shopping at Amazon for, and maybe even join a movement advocating a boycott of Amazon. It's not something to pass new laws over (they would be really freakin scary laws).
For an example of what Amazon could do that would be illegal, if Amazon threatened to not carry any of a given publisher's books if they did not stop publishing certain books they found objectionable, that would run afoul of anti-trust laws. Amazon is in a position to at the very least severely damage that publisher, and they are abusing that position prevent the sale of certain books, which would be in direct competition with Amazon's books (who is also a publisher and retailer).
That would be an illegal abuse of a monopoly, and in fact that would even get a company that was not a monopoly into big legal trouble. The monopoly simply makes the potential damage much greater, and as a result the potential fines much greater.
It only works for a competing publishing company, and even then Amazon must be violating anti-trust laws.
Simply being a monopoly isn't against the law, but it does put you in a position to break laws that are much more difficult for smaller companies to break.
The oft-cited Microsoft example: Microsoft didn't run into legal trouble because they were shipping IE with Windows (at least, not in the US - the EU went way overboard IMO), they ran into legal trouble because they were coercing hardware retailers into not shipping PC's with Netscape pre-installed by threatening to revoke their contracts with MS. Because MS had sole control over who was able to purchase Windows, and because Windows was far and away the most popular OS on the market (95%+ at that time, I believe), not being able to ship Windows was a death sentence for hardware retailers. This abuse of their monopoly position to unfairly eliminate competition is illegal.
I don't see how Amazon's censorship is going to affect any of their competitors in any way (in some ways it's actually a boon to competitors, since they can say "we have it, Amazon doesn't"), so I don't see how it can run afoul of anti-trust laws. They aren't coercing anybody else into not selling these books, they are simply not selling them themselves. That's well within their rights, and if these books can't generate any interest outside of Amazon, well, that's business. Not everyone gets to be successful.
Also note that the flash point of paper (ignition of gasses given off by heated paper) is much lower than the paper's ignition point itself as well.