He is still free to burn Qurans and free to exercise his right to free speech. However he may or may not be allowed to exercise his right in a privately owned venue, which is what rackspace is.
Exactly - because we allow property rights to limit others' freedom of expression. Rackspace is exercising its legal rights to limit the church's freedom of expression.
Just because something limits free expression does not mean that it is wrong. Property rights, noise ordinances, traffic regulations, and zoning laws all limit the people's freedom of expression. Sometimes those limitations are good. Sometimes they are bad. But they are still limitations on free expression.
The issue is more complex than both you and those simply saying, "the First Amendment only applies to government" are describing it. Private actors do not have a duty to facilitate the free speech of others. This principle is accepted by essentially everyone - I've yet to meet a person who thinks I should have to allow a sign on my front yard for a candidate I don't support.
The question is where the refusal of a private actor to facilitate speech crosses the line from perfectly reasonable (as in the yard-sign example) to violation of founding ideals. An explanation of why this instance crosses (or doesn't cross) that line holds much promise for enlightening discussion. A bald statement that doesn't even seem to acknowledge the complex nature of balancing rights does not. The freedom to contract can support a host of other freedoms, including the freedom not to support speech antithetical to one's ideals. That's not something to be hand-waved away with platitudes, but to be addressed with serious discussion that does not assert conclusions as starting premises.
Also, it absolutely does matter if it's legal. While that's not the end of the discussion, it certainly has a place in the discussion. For example, if it is legal, should it be made illegal? If it's not legal, should it be made legal?
These issues are complex. Blatant oversimplification - in either direction - doesn't help matters.
He didn't mention the First Amendment. He mentioned freedom of speech. The First Amendment is the codified protection against government intrusion on that particular freedom. It doesn't apply to private actions.
But that doesn't mean that private actions can't limit freedom of speech. This private action decidedly does - it's a decision to limit expression based on its content. The fact that this ISP has both the legal right (assuming the contract is in order) and, to many, the moral right to do this does not mean that the decision does not limit free speech.
We accept limits on freedoms all the time, because we have to balance the rights of some against the rights of others. In this case, the two rights at issue are freedom of contract and freedom of speech. I suspect that the former supersedes the latter for most people in this case because: (1) contracts are voluntarily entered into; (2) there are other web-hosting alternatives available to the church. I suspect that were the second factor not present - say in the event of a monopoly or oligarchy of web hosting providers who all restricted particular content - quite a few people might consider restricting freedom of contract to prohibit certain types of content-based restrictions in web hosting service agreements.
The question isn't whether this limits freedom of speech. The question is whether this is a proper limitation on freedom of speech. A follow on question would be, if this is improper, should it be allowed under the law.
The idea you can force a company to sell anything doesn't sound very cool to me. If you don't like that, you are free to choose a competing product or build one yourself.
Yep. We're also free to tell people why it's a bad idea to give money to companies that prevent or make difficult acquiring applications from third parties.
Then don't buy their phone if you disagree with the terms of use. Did Apple force you or anyone else to buy an iPhone and agree to their terms?
Not at all. In addition to being free to not buy their phone, I'm also free to explain why it's a bad idea for others to do so. And you're free to explain why those reasons are invalid.
You're also free to say "Then don't buy their phones" in response. There's no rule against non sequiturs. You should no, however, that you haven't said anything relevant on the topic.
There would be nothing Apple can do to stop this person from selling it in an alternative store or through their website to owners of jailbroken iDevices.
No, but it means a user has to choose between a valid warranty plus software updates and access to non-Apple-approved applications. I'd have zero probalem with Apple applying arbitrary and unspecified criteria in their app approval process if they didn't actively work to prevent people from acquiring apps from other sources.
But it does not prevent federal courts from enjoining state officials from violating the law, nor does it prevent suits from proceeding against individual state officials in their own person. So the individuals who did the actual copying could be found liable, and the officials could be enjoined from continuing to violate copyright law.
Somehow I left out part of my post above: Although veil-piercing is relevant in the civil context, it does not apply with respect to an officer or director of a corporation. Veil-piercing is necessary to reach the shareholder of a corporation. In the HP case, it means that those who own HP stock can't be sued directly for the acts of the corporation or its officers.
The coproration provides no legal shield to its officers. Any officer who commited acts making him liable under the anti-pretexting laws is liable whether he performed the act in the coproration's interest or his own. Moreover, if the officer's act can be construed as part of the officer's job - using a very broad interpretation - then the corporation is liable. Again, the corporate structure means there are more people/entities that can be held liable for an act. Some corporations indemnify their officers for certain types of acts, which means they pay the officers' legal bills and possibly judgments against them. But that doesn't mean the officers are not legally liable to the plaintifs. It just means the officers can look to the corporation to cover their liability. If the corporation doesn't pay (say because it goes bankrupt), the officers would still be on the hook.
Comparing an actual sentence to a hypothetical maximum sentence is not a useful exercise. Kernell hasn't been sentenced at all yet, let alone to 20 years. He was convicted of a crime that covers a wide range of activities - everything from lying to an FBI agent, to tampering with evidence, to bribing or blackmailing a witness. The federal sentencing guidelines define a series of fairly small ranges within that 20-year span based on the specific types of behavior and the defendant's criminal history. Although not binding on judges, they are generally followed. In short, there's a vanishingly small chance his sentence will be anything close to 20 years. I'd be very surprised if it's even 2 years for the obstruction conviction.
If she pretexts to find out whether there's a leak on her board, she's now acting as a corporate officer, and thus the company is liable, not Carly, unless the prosecutor or plaintiff can convince a judge to pierce the corporate veil.
This is just flat out wrong. There is no concept of "piercing the corporate" veil with respect to criminal prosecution. Veil-piercing is a product of civil law. Moreover, it is very common for corporate officers to face criminal prosecution for acts committed to further the corporate interest.
To convict a person of a crime, one must generally prove an illegal act committed with the proper state of mind (called mens rea, and in financial crimes this generally means intent to commit the ac). In many corporate scenarios, the mental state does not exist in a single person - it is spread out across many people - and is therefore very hard to prove. In some cases, this spreading out of responsibility is such that no single person ever had the necessary mental state necessary to support a conviction. Corporate prosecution is a way to punish such acts without abrogating our general principle that we don't punish people who didn't commit a crime. It is in addition to prosecution of persons, not instead of, and thus means that more crimes can be punished under our corporate laws than could be if those laws did not exist.
In sum, if a person commits a crime, the legal requirements for prosecution are the same whether committed to further a private or corporate interest.
As a side matter, Fiorina was not at HP when the investigation happened. Link. More importantly, there was little or no evidence that the chair at the time new about the pretexting before it took place. They hired a private investigator who engaged in pretexting. Although this is legally enough to warrant civil liability, it is not sufficient to support criminal liability.
Custom software is the software that isn't being taxed now, as opposed to all the software that is currently taxed in Washington State. It is the status quo that requires a definition of "custom software." If this new bill becomes law, it won't matter whether software is custom, because all software will be subject to the tax. This new bill ends "discriminating certain software and alleviating tax burden on other software."
That doesn't necessarily make it a good change. But at least complain about the right thing.
it's great. you cook at sub-boiling temperatures, with food sealed in an evacuated plastic bag and placed under hot water for long periods. kills all bacteria, so the result doesn't need refridgerating
This is not only wrong, but incredibly dangerous. While you can pasteurize food to kill bacteria (allowing you to safely cook chicken to only 141 degrees, for example, by keeping it at that temperature for a long enough time), sub-boiling temperatures do not kill botulism spores. Those spores are temporarily deactivated at cooking or refrigeration temperatures, but will survive the process. And, since they thrive in an anaerobic environment, the vacuum packing makes it more dangerous, not less, to store the results at room temperature.
There are industrial processes that cook sous-vide food in pressure cookers long enough to kill the spores. It's essentially canning in a different container. But that's most definitely not done at sub-boiling temperatures.
Sous vide cooking, done right, is safe. And it's more precisely repeatable than many other forms of cooking. I store sous vide meals in their packaging in my freezer indefinitely, and the fridge for a week or so. But unless you cook the food under to boiling under at least 15 PSI pressure for a long enough period of time, which you cannot do in the bags used for home vacuum sealers, it is life-threatening to store a sous vide meal at room temperature for more than a few hours.
"Just a nitpick, but that is almost 100% likely to NOT be prior art in any way."
The implication was not that Tom Clancy's novel is prior art, but that the place he lifted it from is prior art. That is, the novel is evidence of the existence of prior art, not the prior art itself.
"Even assuming the novel did have source code, Clancy might be going about doing it in a totally different way than Amazon patented doing it."
The source he took it from might implement the process in a truly different way (hence "sounds like"). I find it unlikely, though. I certainly place the odds of the process referenced by Clancy not being prior art at much lower than "almost 100%."
First, I read about this in a Tom Clancy novel in the 80s. Sounds like prior art to me.
Second, if I buy a book, I expect the words in that book to be the ones the author (with the help of his editors) put there. If I buy "Tale of Two Cities" and they deliver something that starts with "It was the best of eras, it was the worst of eras," then I'm not getting what I paid for. Sounds like false advertising.
So I wasn't out of line when I wanted to vomit at, "Can't we just put it on the cloud?" Christ, it was like a Dilbert strip. One meeting every 3 or 4 years is plenty for me, thanks.
Who is more valuable? The geek who has to fight the urge to vomit when his boss asks him a technical question, or the geek who can ask intelligent questions to determine the manager's true needs and then explain why the cloud is not a good solution?
I don't understand the Pope's objection. The body is nothing more than a meat machine that holds the soul. If we have the technology to improve the machine that houses the soul, what is the problem? Jesus Christ. The disciples fixed the broken machine all the time in the new testament, back then it was called a miracle. Now we have the technology to improve the lives of all future children it would be a crime not to remove genetic diseases.
The difference is that the disciples fixed the broken meat machine. From the Pope's perspective concerning when human life and associated personhood begins, the process described in the article destroys the broken meat machine.
Wouldn't it be better to eradicate the suffering in the first place?
Not by eradicating the sufferer. Again, this is from the Pope's perspective concerning the start of human life. From that perspective, the destruction of the embryos with the diseases in question is the killing of a human being.
I'm responding not to convince you of that position regarding the start of life, but rather because you said you didn't understand the Pope's objection. Hopefully now you can understand, even if you don't agree with his position.
Don't be deceived by the summary. The Pope doesn't approve of destroying embryos because they have diseases (or predispositions to diseases) or because of their sex, either. "But when their pre-implantation diagnostic services began including the baby's eye and hair color, even the Pope objected" is highly misleading regarding the Pope's line-drawing on this subject.
It is an artificial system, just like letting companies "buy" parts of the radio spectrum.
The difference being that the spectrum is far more limited and requires a much bigger capital investment to utilize. The same things that make an internet domain accessible to a family posting pictures - freedom to choose essentially any unclaimed name and a relatively low cost - make it accessible to cybersquatters. To the extent squatters pay less - such as passing the "tasted" domains back and forth between subsidiaries - the system needs adjusting. To the extent squatters are sitting on names protected by trademark, it is possible to seek redress now. That system isn't particularly efficient, but it's at least as efficient as a government-backed screening board determining if a site is "bogus."
If a human passing judgment on whether a site is bogus or not is needed then so be it.
The judgment is easy to make now only because there isn't such a rule. Therefore, squatters spend zero energy on the charade that is their websites. As soon as there is some kind of agency passing judgment, then the placeholder sites will become something harder to deem "bogus." At it's heart, the internet is about speech - precisely the area we want to limit government judgment calls. Put simply, I don't like the idea of deciding which speech is deemed worthy of its domain name.
So, personally, I'd like to see legislation that enforced some sort of simple calculation for squatted domains: $price = $30 x # of years the squatter has squatted on the domain. The squatter gets to make back their investment (which is a better deal than the ticket scalper is guaranteed to make) and an actual entrepreneur is able to use the domain to increase the value of the economy which benefits everyone. What do you think?
I think that, while I'm not fond of cybersquatters, I'm far less fond of having the government evaluate internet sites to decide if they are using a domain name in a way that adds "value."
Let's say I have a domain based on my last name. I keep photos there and not much else. A company that uses my name as a trademark approaches me to buy the domain. Under your plan, I couldn't sell the domain for more than it cost me to maintain it - the same amount I'd have to spend to keep whatever new domain I get to replace my current one. In this case, the transaction would create value - each party would have more value after the transaction than before.
Of course there's a difference between the scenario I gave here and one involving cybersquatters. But the only way to determine there is a difference is for someone to look at the use to which the domain is being put and decide that use A "adds value" and use B does not. I'd rather that decision be made by private individuals in the context of single transactions than by some government-appointed authority (be that some agency or a court where the law would be enforced).
And you can't get around this problem. Sure, it's easy to say that ad-only "search" sites don't add value. As soon as you enact that into law, the cybersquatters will put something else there. And each something else they put there will be closer and closer to a more acceptable use.
I think the EFF does a lot of good things -- but their PR blurbs tend to leave out enough critical info that I am beginning to dismiss them out of hand.
Good call. The warrant affidavit goes into some detail about the alleged crimes. The informant is not anonymous and had provided credible information for other investigations. That is generally enough to meet the fairly low burden of probable cause.
Certainly, there's a lot there for a defense attorney to attack. For example, the person whose property was searched has allegedly played a prank on the informant. That goes to credibility at trial, though, not to whether the informant can provide evidence sufficient to make out probable cause.
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He is still free to burn Qurans and free to exercise his right to free speech. However he may or may not be allowed to exercise his right in a privately owned venue, which is what rackspace is.
Exactly - because we allow property rights to limit others' freedom of expression. Rackspace is exercising its legal rights to limit the church's freedom of expression.
Just because something limits free expression does not mean that it is wrong. Property rights, noise ordinances, traffic regulations, and zoning laws all limit the people's freedom of expression. Sometimes those limitations are good. Sometimes they are bad. But they are still limitations on free expression.
Which was pretty much the point of the rest of the post you quoted.
The issue is more complex than both you and those simply saying, "the First Amendment only applies to government" are describing it. Private actors do not have a duty to facilitate the free speech of others. This principle is accepted by essentially everyone - I've yet to meet a person who thinks I should have to allow a sign on my front yard for a candidate I don't support.
The question is where the refusal of a private actor to facilitate speech crosses the line from perfectly reasonable (as in the yard-sign example) to violation of founding ideals. An explanation of why this instance crosses (or doesn't cross) that line holds much promise for enlightening discussion. A bald statement that doesn't even seem to acknowledge the complex nature of balancing rights does not. The freedom to contract can support a host of other freedoms, including the freedom not to support speech antithetical to one's ideals. That's not something to be hand-waved away with platitudes, but to be addressed with serious discussion that does not assert conclusions as starting premises.
Also, it absolutely does matter if it's legal. While that's not the end of the discussion, it certainly has a place in the discussion. For example, if it is legal, should it be made illegal? If it's not legal, should it be made legal?
These issues are complex. Blatant oversimplification - in either direction - doesn't help matters.
He didn't mention the First Amendment. He mentioned freedom of speech. The First Amendment is the codified protection against government intrusion on that particular freedom. It doesn't apply to private actions.
But that doesn't mean that private actions can't limit freedom of speech. This private action decidedly does - it's a decision to limit expression based on its content. The fact that this ISP has both the legal right (assuming the contract is in order) and, to many, the moral right to do this does not mean that the decision does not limit free speech.
We accept limits on freedoms all the time, because we have to balance the rights of some against the rights of others. In this case, the two rights at issue are freedom of contract and freedom of speech. I suspect that the former supersedes the latter for most people in this case because: (1) contracts are voluntarily entered into; (2) there are other web-hosting alternatives available to the church. I suspect that were the second factor not present - say in the event of a monopoly or oligarchy of web hosting providers who all restricted particular content - quite a few people might consider restricting freedom of contract to prohibit certain types of content-based restrictions in web hosting service agreements.
The question isn't whether this limits freedom of speech. The question is whether this is a proper limitation on freedom of speech. A follow on question would be, if this is improper, should it be allowed under the law.
Schedules in some courts can be pretty inflexible when transport of a prisoner is involved.
The idea you can force a company to sell anything doesn't sound very cool to me. If you don't like that, you are free to choose a competing product or build one yourself.
Yep. We're also free to tell people why it's a bad idea to give money to companies that prevent or make difficult acquiring applications from third parties.
Then don't buy their phone if you disagree with the terms of use. Did Apple force you or anyone else to buy an iPhone and agree to their terms?
Not at all. In addition to being free to not buy their phone, I'm also free to explain why it's a bad idea for others to do so. And you're free to explain why those reasons are invalid.
You're also free to say "Then don't buy their phones" in response. There's no rule against non sequiturs. You should no, however, that you haven't said anything relevant on the topic.
There would be nothing Apple can do to stop this person from selling it in an alternative store or through their website to owners of jailbroken iDevices.
No, but it means a user has to choose between a valid warranty plus software updates and access to non-Apple-approved applications. I'd have zero probalem with Apple applying arbitrary and unspecified criteria in their app approval process if they didn't actively work to prevent people from acquiring apps from other sources.
But it does not prevent federal courts from enjoining state officials from violating the law, nor does it prevent suits from proceeding against individual state officials in their own person. So the individuals who did the actual copying could be found liable, and the officials could be enjoined from continuing to violate copyright law.
Somehow I left out part of my post above: Although veil-piercing is relevant in the civil context, it does not apply with respect to an officer or director of a corporation. Veil-piercing is necessary to reach the shareholder of a corporation. In the HP case, it means that those who own HP stock can't be sued directly for the acts of the corporation or its officers.
The coproration provides no legal shield to its officers. Any officer who commited acts making him liable under the anti-pretexting laws is liable whether he performed the act in the coproration's interest or his own. Moreover, if the officer's act can be construed as part of the officer's job - using a very broad interpretation - then the corporation is liable. Again, the corporate structure means there are more people/entities that can be held liable for an act. Some corporations indemnify their officers for certain types of acts, which means they pay the officers' legal bills and possibly judgments against them. But that doesn't mean the officers are not legally liable to the plaintifs. It just means the officers can look to the corporation to cover their liability. If the corporation doesn't pay (say because it goes bankrupt), the officers would still be on the hook.
Comparing an actual sentence to a hypothetical maximum sentence is not a useful exercise. Kernell hasn't been sentenced at all yet, let alone to 20 years. He was convicted of a crime that covers a wide range of activities - everything from lying to an FBI agent, to tampering with evidence, to bribing or blackmailing a witness. The federal sentencing guidelines define a series of fairly small ranges within that 20-year span based on the specific types of behavior and the defendant's criminal history. Although not binding on judges, they are generally followed. In short, there's a vanishingly small chance his sentence will be anything close to 20 years. I'd be very surprised if it's even 2 years for the obstruction conviction.
If she pretexts to find out whether there's a leak on her board, she's now acting as a corporate officer, and thus the company is liable, not Carly, unless the prosecutor or plaintiff can convince a judge to pierce the corporate veil.
This is just flat out wrong. There is no concept of "piercing the corporate" veil with respect to criminal prosecution. Veil-piercing is a product of civil law. Moreover, it is very common for corporate officers to face criminal prosecution for acts committed to further the corporate interest.
To convict a person of a crime, one must generally prove an illegal act committed with the proper state of mind (called mens rea, and in financial crimes this generally means intent to commit the ac). In many corporate scenarios, the mental state does not exist in a single person - it is spread out across many people - and is therefore very hard to prove. In some cases, this spreading out of responsibility is such that no single person ever had the necessary mental state necessary to support a conviction. Corporate prosecution is a way to punish such acts without abrogating our general principle that we don't punish people who didn't commit a crime. It is in addition to prosecution of persons, not instead of, and thus means that more crimes can be punished under our corporate laws than could be if those laws did not exist.
In sum, if a person commits a crime, the legal requirements for prosecution are the same whether committed to further a private or corporate interest.
As a side matter, Fiorina was not at HP when the investigation happened. Link. More importantly, there was little or no evidence that the chair at the time new about the pretexting before it took place. They hired a private investigator who engaged in pretexting. Although this is legally enough to warrant civil liability, it is not sufficient to support criminal liability.
Custom software is the software that isn't being taxed now, as opposed to all the software that is currently taxed in Washington State. It is the status quo that requires a definition of "custom software." If this new bill becomes law, it won't matter whether software is custom, because all software will be subject to the tax. This new bill ends "discriminating certain software and alleviating tax burden on other software."
That doesn't necessarily make it a good change. But at least complain about the right thing.
it's great. you cook at sub-boiling temperatures, with food sealed in an evacuated plastic bag and placed under hot water for long periods. kills all bacteria, so the result doesn't need refridgerating
This is not only wrong, but incredibly dangerous. While you can pasteurize food to kill bacteria (allowing you to safely cook chicken to only 141 degrees, for example, by keeping it at that temperature for a long enough time), sub-boiling temperatures do not kill botulism spores. Those spores are temporarily deactivated at cooking or refrigeration temperatures, but will survive the process. And, since they thrive in an anaerobic environment, the vacuum packing makes it more dangerous, not less, to store the results at room temperature.
There are industrial processes that cook sous-vide food in pressure cookers long enough to kill the spores. It's essentially canning in a different container. But that's most definitely not done at sub-boiling temperatures.
Sous vide cooking, done right, is safe. And it's more precisely repeatable than many other forms of cooking. I store sous vide meals in their packaging in my freezer indefinitely, and the fridge for a week or so. But unless you cook the food under to boiling under at least 15 PSI pressure for a long enough period of time, which you cannot do in the bags used for home vacuum sealers, it is life-threatening to store a sous vide meal at room temperature for more than a few hours.
"Just a nitpick, but that is almost 100% likely to NOT be prior art in any way."
The implication was not that Tom Clancy's novel is prior art, but that the place he lifted it from is prior art. That is, the novel is evidence of the existence of prior art, not the prior art itself.
"Even assuming the novel did have source code, Clancy might be going about doing it in a totally different way than Amazon patented doing it."
The source he took it from might implement the process in a truly different way (hence "sounds like"). I find it unlikely, though. I certainly place the odds of the process referenced by Clancy not being prior art at much lower than "almost 100%."
First, I read about this in a Tom Clancy novel in the 80s. Sounds like prior art to me. Second, if I buy a book, I expect the words in that book to be the ones the author (with the help of his editors) put there. If I buy "Tale of Two Cities" and they deliver something that starts with "It was the best of eras, it was the worst of eras," then I'm not getting what I paid for. Sounds like false advertising.
So I wasn't out of line when I wanted to vomit at, "Can't we just put it on the cloud?" Christ, it was like a Dilbert strip. One meeting every 3 or 4 years is plenty for me, thanks.
Who is more valuable? The geek who has to fight the urge to vomit when his boss asks him a technical question, or the geek who can ask intelligent questions to determine the manager's true needs and then explain why the cloud is not a good solution?
I don't understand the Pope's objection. The body is nothing more than a meat machine that holds the soul. If we have the technology to improve the machine that houses the soul, what is the problem? Jesus Christ. The disciples fixed the broken machine all the time in the new testament, back then it was called a miracle. Now we have the technology to improve the lives of all future children it would be a crime not to remove genetic diseases.
The difference is that the disciples fixed the broken meat machine. From the Pope's perspective concerning when human life and associated personhood begins, the process described in the article destroys the broken meat machine.
Wouldn't it be better to eradicate the suffering in the first place?
Not by eradicating the sufferer. Again, this is from the Pope's perspective concerning the start of human life. From that perspective, the destruction of the embryos with the diseases in question is the killing of a human being.
I'm responding not to convince you of that position regarding the start of life, but rather because you said you didn't understand the Pope's objection. Hopefully now you can understand, even if you don't agree with his position.
Don't be deceived by the summary. The Pope doesn't approve of destroying embryos because they have diseases (or predispositions to diseases) or because of their sex, either. "But when their pre-implantation diagnostic services began including the baby's eye and hair color, even the Pope objected" is highly misleading regarding the Pope's line-drawing on this subject.
It is an artificial system, just like letting companies "buy" parts of the radio spectrum.
The difference being that the spectrum is far more limited and requires a much bigger capital investment to utilize. The same things that make an internet domain accessible to a family posting pictures - freedom to choose essentially any unclaimed name and a relatively low cost - make it accessible to cybersquatters. To the extent squatters pay less - such as passing the "tasted" domains back and forth between subsidiaries - the system needs adjusting. To the extent squatters are sitting on names protected by trademark, it is possible to seek redress now. That system isn't particularly efficient, but it's at least as efficient as a government-backed screening board determining if a site is "bogus."
If a human passing judgment on whether a site is bogus or not is needed then so be it.
The judgment is easy to make now only because there isn't such a rule. Therefore, squatters spend zero energy on the charade that is their websites. As soon as there is some kind of agency passing judgment, then the placeholder sites will become something harder to deem "bogus." At it's heart, the internet is about speech - precisely the area we want to limit government judgment calls. Put simply, I don't like the idea of deciding which speech is deemed worthy of its domain name.
So, personally, I'd like to see legislation that enforced some sort of simple calculation for squatted domains: $price = $30 x # of years the squatter has squatted on the domain. The squatter gets to make back their investment (which is a better deal than the ticket scalper is guaranteed to make) and an actual entrepreneur is able to use the domain to increase the value of the economy which benefits everyone. What do you think?
I think that, while I'm not fond of cybersquatters, I'm far less fond of having the government evaluate internet sites to decide if they are using a domain name in a way that adds "value."
Let's say I have a domain based on my last name. I keep photos there and not much else. A company that uses my name as a trademark approaches me to buy the domain. Under your plan, I couldn't sell the domain for more than it cost me to maintain it - the same amount I'd have to spend to keep whatever new domain I get to replace my current one. In this case, the transaction would create value - each party would have more value after the transaction than before.
Of course there's a difference between the scenario I gave here and one involving cybersquatters. But the only way to determine there is a difference is for someone to look at the use to which the domain is being put and decide that use A "adds value" and use B does not. I'd rather that decision be made by private individuals in the context of single transactions than by some government-appointed authority (be that some agency or a court where the law would be enforced).
And you can't get around this problem. Sure, it's easy to say that ad-only "search" sites don't add value. As soon as you enact that into law, the cybersquatters will put something else there. And each something else they put there will be closer and closer to a more acceptable use.
Fault is essentially irrelevant to anyone who has already purchased this firewall.
Read the summary: it's available only to subscribers until May 5. After that, it's in general release.
I think the EFF does a lot of good things -- but their PR blurbs tend to leave out enough critical info that I am beginning to dismiss them out of hand.
Good call. The warrant affidavit goes into some detail about the alleged crimes. The informant is not anonymous and had provided credible information for other investigations. That is generally enough to meet the fairly low burden of probable cause.
Certainly, there's a lot there for a defense attorney to attack. For example, the person whose property was searched has allegedly played a prank on the informant. That goes to credibility at trial, though, not to whether the informant can provide evidence sufficient to make out probable cause.
The Electric Sky has been pretty thoroughly debunked. For example.