More likely: "We buy millions of dollars worth of drives each year, and our buying decisions are driven in part by the reliability data that we collect. If we told everyone what kind of drives work best, more people would buy those drives, driving up the price that we pay."
I was at the hearing yesterday morning when the case was argued to a California state appeals court.
This case is mainly about the extent of the protections that California gives journalists as a matter of state law: if you're a journalist (whatever that might happen to mean), and someone wants to have a court order you to discover your source, they have to make a strong showing of necessity to get that order issued.
Apple did originally (and, in my view, wrongly) argue that the bloggers in question weren't journalists, but nobody in the case seems to be seriously debating that point anymore. The lower court assumed without deciding that they were journalists, and found that the journalist protections don't apply; at the appeal hearing yesterday, Apple's lawyer made clear his position that if his opponent were the San Jose Mercury or the New York Times, Apple should still win.
This case will almost certainly be decided on the question of whether Apple could compel any journalist, including a newspaper reporter, in this position to disclose a source.
First: the broadcast flag was a legal case: Am. Library Ass'n v. FCC, decided by a unanimous panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. You're right, there never was a broadcast flag - thanks to the efforts of EFF and Public Knowledge. If they hadn't intervened, the broadcast flag would today be the law: the FCC had ordered it to go into effect on July 1, but the result of the litigation was a finding that the FCC's order overstepped its legal authority.
Second: EFF legal victories since its founding - from the Steve Jackson Games Secret Service raid to the Diebold memos. Has EFF won every case? No. Few advocacy groups do. But you don't get to throw around statements like "[a]ll their cases have failed miserably" without some facts to back you up. You don't have them.
The Ninth Circuit, like all the circuit courts of appeals, hears cases in three-judge panels. The panel in the Betamax case consisted of Judges Kilkenny and Canby, plus a district court judge named East who was sitting by designation (basically, district judges occasionally sit on appellate panels, and in this case, that happened.) That panel unanimously found Sony liable for distributing the VCR. (If you happen to have a law library nearby, the citation is 659 F.2d 963.)
The Ninth Circuit then denied en banc rehearing, meaning that it refused to rehear the case before a panel of all the circuit judges. The Supreme Court took the case and reversed the panel, 5-4.
Justice Kennedy was apparently never involved in the Betamax case at any level.
I don't think you can claim the Patriot Act decision last week says anything about the Supreme Court's jurisprudence, since the Supreme Court isn't the court that handed that decision down.
If the government chooses to appeal, it must first bring its case to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (the 2nd Circuit is a geographical division that includes New York.) The loser there can appeal to the Supreme Court, which may or may not decide to hear the case - it has thousands of petitions and can only hear a few dozen each term.
If, as in the do-not-call case, the Supreme Court chooses not to hear the case (denies cert), the decision of the lower court stands. This shouldn't be read as an affirmative decision of the Court to favor one side of the issue or not, just a deference to the judgment of the circuit courts coupled with an inability to hear every case that goes up.
Unfortunately, EFF has decided it must withdraw from the Combined Federal Campaign, which, I believe, is the program you mention.
The CFC is now requiring organizations that receive funds to check the names of their employees against terrorism "watch lists" in order to participate. It's not clear what organizations have to do if they discover they employ someone whose name appears on the list (such as anyone named "Julio Ramirez.") The privacy implications of such a policy should be apparent.
The EFF, ACLU, and several other organizations have therefore withdrawn from the program. Please note that you can still donate and deduct your donation from your taxes, you just won't be able to do it through the convenience of a federal employee paycheck deduction.
Speaking as an EFF volunteer, I'd really appreciate it if you'd continue to donate, despite the extra burden on your time.
Many states have enacted that a police officer "may demand" the name of a Terry-stop suspect, but provide no explicit criminal penalties for refusing to acede to that demand.
Another possibility that works very well: map the function to a screen corner. Then picking a window can be done by reaching for the mouse, throwing it (say) up and to the left, then pointing to the desired window and clicking.
I have my top-left corner mapped to tile windows, and my top-right mapped to move all the windows out of the way.
You may have the two major parts - anti-circumvention and ISP liability limitation - of the DMCA confused or conflated when you dismiss the efficiacy of a counterclaim.
The anti-circumvention provisions are contained in Title I of the DMCA. It states, in part: "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that...is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title..." (17 USC 1201).
DMCA notices and counter-notices are covered by Title II. A DMCA notice must contain "Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site." (17 USC 512). Title II refers only to copyright infringement, which is a distinct act from trafficking in a circumvention device.
Subtle point: I don't think that you can combine the two into one. Apple doesn't allege that PlayFair infringes its copyrights - after all, Apple did not write PlayFair, nor is PlayFair a derived work of anything Apple wrote. PlayFair itself is copyrighted by its authors, not Apple. It may or may not infringe on Apple's Title I "paracopyright," but this is a separate issue from infringing on actual copyrights, and so I don't think that Title II covers it.
If the PlayFair people wanted, I think they could send a DMCA counter-notice to SourceForge indicating that they are not infringing on Apple's copyrights.
Depends on your dialect. If you pronounce it "con-tro-ver-see-al," then you're right; if (as dictionary.com suggests) you say "con-tro-ver-shall," then the author is right.
It helps, for the 3-D version, to visualize a square sheet of rubber with some thickness, rather than a cube. My visualizing intuition didn't want to swallow the idea of a rubber cube that was stretchy enough so that one face could be pulled around to touch the other.
"I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the elimination of the Taliban. I thought that group was a clear and present danger to the United States, and I supported what the President did."
One of the biggest reasons? Blind people. DRE machines are *huge* for blind people, because they can be supplemented with an audio interface that help them vote unassisted. Computer-mediated voting allows any number of interfaces to be presented in order to overcome various disabilities.
Some of the biggest advocates for DRE machines have been advocates for the blind and other disabled people who have previously required help at the polls.
I figured that one too, when I saw the name. It might not mean "the opposite of integrity" but it sure does draw a nice distinction.
If integrity is right behavior due to moral values within, extegrity is right behavior due to a system of rules imposed from without. Sounds about like what the product they're hawking is for.
I've also encountered Extegrity's product, which is required at my law school. It does have at least rudimentary protection against the most obvious workarounds - when I tried to run it within VMWare, it "failed security check" and refused to operate. I'm not sure how exactly it checks to see if it's running in a virtualized environment - one project I have on my back-burner is to see how well it deals with bochs.
I'm also the proud owner of a PowerBook. My solution was to trade some other computer gear for a big old PC laptop with a mostly-dead battery that meets the system requirements. I plan to use that laptop only for taking exams. Aside from exams, my school is fairly platform-agnostic: papers are turned in on paper, and the only electronic interaction with professors is via email. The one kink that I have run into is profs and fellow students who insist on sharing their academic insight via Word.doc files. OpenOffice hasn't failed me yet, though, and of course Word for the Mac exists and is frequently available at a steep discount to students.
The primary difference is that ATMs keep detailed logs that are constantly checked and counter-checked, and among the things logged is the putative identity of the person who took money out. If an ATM gives out $1500 to a particular person, there's a starting point for an investigation. As a result, potential attackers are chary of a whole class of attacks - those that risk disclosing their identitites. It just isn't that way with voting systems, which have anonymity built right in. This makes the security problems harder - you're welding the accuracy and accountability demands of an ATM network to the anonymity demands of the secret ballot. No one is allowed to know that it was me who cast that particular ballot, and the information that might prove it must be thrown away as quickly as possible after it's generated.
Oh, yeah, and voting machines must be lightweight, so that they can be rolled out into thousands of polling stations and rolled back after election day. ATMs are armored safes permanently bricked into buildings. That sort of physical security makes infeasible a whole host of security problems - theft, modification, vandalism among them.
And there's no higher power to appeal to - no bank president who can decide that it's not worth the loss of goodwill to follow up on the occasional apparent $1500 giveaway, or that someone who claims a "phantom withdrawal" should be refunded without exacting proof of anything wrong happening. Patchy measures are fine in business, as long as everybody ends up more or less happy, but have no place in elections.
And if ATMs break, banks are out millions or even billions of dollars, so they pay top dollar to make sure that they don't break. What happens if voting machines break? Who's motivated to pay to avoid that consequence?
It's a much, much harder security problem both intrinsically and put into its practical context.
Just thought of something else. Even if you don't see an intrinsic difference between the GPS tracker and a 24-hour police tail, the GPS still has more functionality that makes it harder to justify as an investigatory measure that should be available without a warrant.
A police officer tailing you without a warrant may not follow you onto private property where he does not have permission to go. If you turn into the driveway of your thousand-acre ranch that's surrounded by vision-obscuring terrain like hills or trees, he cannot follow in order to see whether you're going to the ranch house or the isolated spot where they think the body or drugs or whatever are hidden.
The GPS tracker, however, will blithely continue to broadcast your coordinates, giving the police more information about your movements than our hypothetical, Constitutionally sound tail cop would be able to learn.
The only way to bring a remedy to this situation would be to have a database encompassing everywhere the suspect might possibly go, dividing space into points our tailing cop might be able to see from a public vantage point and points he would not be able to see. The information that the tracker emitted when the suspect was in protected areas would have to be thrown out before anyone with the investigation could view the GPS logs. This would restore the GPS tracker to the capacity of an infinitely skilled police tail who nonetheless respects the suspect's privacy rights.
It should be clear that the above scheme is utterly ridiculous and could never work. And because such a scheme is the only means for safeguarding the rights of a suspect when he goes onto private property, the GPS tracker may not be used without a warrant at all.
[Note: the Court of Appeals is the lower court being overruled here]
The Court of Appeals also held that use of the GPS devices was merely sense augmenting, revealing information that Jackson exposed to public view. The court noted that law enforcement officers could legally follow Jackson on his travels to the ministorage compartment and the two gravesites. We do not agree that use of the GPS devices to monitor Mr. Jackson's travels merely equates to following him on public roads where he has voluntarily exposed himself to public view.
It is true that an officer standing at a distance in a lawful place may use binoculars to bring into closer view what he sees, or an officer may use a flashlight at night to see what is plainly there to be seen by day. However, when a GPS device is attached to a vehicle, law enforcement officers do not in fact follow the vehicle. Thus, unlike binoculars or a flashlight, the GPS device does not merely augment the officers' senses, but rather provides a technological substitute for traditional visual tracking. Further, the devices in this case were in place for approximately two and one-half weeks. It is unlikely that the sheriff's department could have successfully maintained uninterrupted 24-hour surveillance throughout this time by following Jackson. Even longer tracking periods might be undertaken, depending upon the circumstances of a case. We perceive a difference between the kind of uninterrupted, 24-hour a day surveillance possible through use of a GPS device, which does not depend upon whether an officer could in fact have maintained visual contact over the tracking period, and an officer's use of binoculars or a flashlight to augment his or her senses.
I'm starting to think that we need the equivalent of a national sign ordinance for advertisement as a whole.
If you own a factory, and you spew pollution into the air and it goes over onto my property, then you've violated my rights and the rights of everyone around you. You've taken a public good (the clean air that we all share) and diminished it.
Government exists, in part, to maintain public goods and see that those who diminish them pay for it. If you pollute the air, we have ways to make you bear the cost you've placed on society - in econmic terms, we've eliminated a negative externality.
Over-advertisement also constitutes a negative externality. As our perceptual space becomes more and more filled with the products of marketers, everyone is worse off. I'm worse off because of the telemarking calls and spam that I receive, the billboards that mar my view on the highway, the cross-advertisement that I have to bear due to marketing agreements between companies. The rapacity of the marketing I'm exposed to increases over time. Advertisers have entered into an arms race, with each ramping up the intrusiveness of their propaganda so that they can have a leg-up on other advertisers using less intrusive methods. Nowhere is this more clear than in the progression of advertisement methods on the 'Net: first static banner ads, then animated banner ads, then pop-up windows, then adware that doesn't even require a web browser. The advertisement gets more and more intrusive, builds to a fever pitch. Advertisers are worse off, because they have to spend more and more time constructing advertising methods to one-up the competiton; consumers are worse off because the volume of noise they're exposed to keeps increasing.
Wealthy towns in America have figured this out already, and instituted sign ordinances on businesses. You aren't allowed to have a sign be too tall, or too garish, or too obvious. The playing field is leveled at a lower point; all the businesses compete for customers on a fair plane, and the residents of the town are much better off due to the beautification of their town's commercial district.
This anti-telemarking legislation falls into the same area. It levels the playing field for companies (though it fails to work for everyone; some classes of business aren't affected), and makes things better off on all consumers with telephones. Since the corporations are held in check by the rules, they know that, while they cannot use telemarking as a tool to gain market share, neither can their competitors. Almost everyone benefits in this arrangement; the losers are firms established for the purpose of engaging in telemarketing. But we as a society have decided that telemarketing is bad, and so it's okay for these companies to lose, just as it's okay for companies that commit fraud or sell bad products to lose.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in the discussion, the US has the least to gain from switching over to IPv6. Since the Internet is, after all, a mostly American invention, there is some US-centricity to it, especially in the DNS system and in the allocation of IP addresses. Amercians own more IPv4 addresses than the rest of the world combined. We have the least to gain from going IPv6, and the most to lose.
I freely admit this is somewhat of a bad thing.
In the last few years, IP addresses have become a scarce resource that people are willing to pay for. Demand is literally outstripping supply, and you can tell it is because people are paying good money for blocks of addresses. (Down at a more personal level, you'll pay more for a broadband connection with a static IP address.) People are buying numbers. This isn't something the designers of the Internet, who foresaw a system with a few tens of millions of nodes at most, could have anticipated. They didn't imagine that every Chinese citizen might want to wander around with a cell phone connected to the 'Net.
There are infinitely many numbers, so it's basically pointless to compete economically over them. The right answer from an efficiency standpoint is to transition to IPv6. Sure, it'll be a pain in the butt as we get it done, but the rewards will be significant.
Even in paperback books with the covers ripped off, the language warning against stripped books doesn't mention copyright liability. Here's the language used by one publisher:
The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as "unsold and destroyed." Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this "stripped book."
Note the language here: "unauthorized." That literally means that the publisher does not authorize the sale. But so what? The publisher's authorization means nothing, unless I copy, perform, or create a derivative work of the book in question. When the bookstore cannot sell these legally made copies of the book in question, it tears off the covers and sends them back to the publisher. There is no doubt a contract involved in which the bookstore commits not to sell the stripped books, but if the bookstore violates that contract, or discards the books, then whoever bought the books or claims them from the refuse heap has not done anything wrong: they have acquired a legally produced copy, not stolen property. Unlike dollar bills in a bank's vault, copyrighted works do not magically lose their abstracted value by virtue of legal wand-waving.
It's just the same in this case: the hobby store probably had an agreement to destroy unsold patterns, and violated that agreement by simply discarding the patterns. As a result of that violation, anyone who wanted to could legally take ownership of the discarded patterns - and this company did.
That's the copyright case. The paracopyright (DMCA) case has no leg to stand on, because there was no actual copyright infringement. The right answer, before running off to court, is to send a DMCA counter-notice stating that McCall's does not own the copyright to the web pages in question. These pages are copyrighted, not by McCall's, but by Monsterpatterns; they do not themselves contain the copyrighted patterns. (If Monsterpatterns were disseminating the patterns themselves on their website, then this would constitute copyright infringement, since digitial distribution implies that a copy is made. The same is not true of distribution of envelopes that are not copied.)
Slashdot Mirror
More likely: "We buy millions of dollars worth of drives each year, and our buying decisions are driven in part by the reliability data that we collect. If we told everyone what kind of drives work best, more people would buy those drives, driving up the price that we pay."
I was at the hearing yesterday morning when the case was argued to a California state appeals court.
This case is mainly about the extent of the protections that California gives journalists as a matter of state law: if you're a journalist (whatever that might happen to mean), and someone wants to have a court order you to discover your source, they have to make a strong showing of necessity to get that order issued.
Apple did originally (and, in my view, wrongly) argue that the bloggers in question weren't journalists, but nobody in the case seems to be seriously debating that point anymore. The lower court assumed without deciding that they were journalists, and found that the journalist protections don't apply; at the appeal hearing yesterday, Apple's lawyer made clear his position that if his opponent were the San Jose Mercury or the New York Times, Apple should still win.
This case will almost certainly be decided on the question of whether Apple could compel any journalist, including a newspaper reporter, in this position to disclose a source.
I won't try to argue here, but I will suggest, in the interest of balance, that you check out EFF's list of legal victories.
Second: EFF legal victories since its founding - from the Steve Jackson Games Secret Service raid to the Diebold memos. Has EFF won every case? No. Few advocacy groups do. But you don't get to throw around statements like "[a]ll their cases have failed miserably" without some facts to back you up. You don't have them.
The Ninth Circuit, like all the circuit courts of appeals, hears cases in three-judge panels. The panel in the Betamax case consisted of Judges Kilkenny and Canby, plus a district court judge named East who was sitting by designation (basically, district judges occasionally sit on appellate panels, and in this case, that happened.) That panel unanimously found Sony liable for distributing the VCR. (If you happen to have a law library nearby, the citation is 659 F.2d 963.)
The Ninth Circuit then denied en banc rehearing, meaning that it refused to rehear the case before a panel of all the circuit judges. The Supreme Court took the case and reversed the panel, 5-4.
Justice Kennedy was apparently never involved in the Betamax case at any level.
I don't think you can claim the Patriot Act decision last week says anything about the Supreme Court's jurisprudence, since the Supreme Court isn't the court that handed that decision down.
The ruling you're probably alluding to, Doe v. Ashcroft , has not yet reached the Supreme Court. The decision reported in the news last week was handed down by Judge Marrero of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
If the government chooses to appeal, it must first bring its case to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (the 2nd Circuit is a geographical division that includes New York.) The loser there can appeal to the Supreme Court, which may or may not decide to hear the case - it has thousands of petitions and can only hear a few dozen each term.
If, as in the do-not-call case, the Supreme Court chooses not to hear the case (denies cert), the decision of the lower court stands. This shouldn't be read as an affirmative decision of the Court to favor one side of the issue or not, just a deference to the judgment of the circuit courts coupled with an inability to hear every case that goes up.
Unfortunately, EFF has decided it must withdraw from the Combined Federal Campaign, which, I believe, is the program you mention.
The CFC is now requiring organizations that receive funds to check the names of their employees against terrorism "watch lists" in order to participate. It's not clear what organizations have to do if they discover they employ someone whose name appears on the list (such as anyone named "Julio Ramirez.") The privacy implications of such a policy should be apparent.
The EFF, ACLU, and several other organizations have therefore withdrawn from the program. Please note that you can still donate and deduct your donation from your taxes, you just won't be able to do it through the convenience of a federal employee paycheck deduction.
Speaking as an EFF volunteer, I'd really appreciate it if you'd continue to donate, despite the extra burden on your time.
The Cato Institute provides a useful list in their amicus brief.
Many states have enacted that a police officer "may demand" the name of a Terry-stop suspect, but provide no explicit criminal penalties for refusing to acede to that demand.
Another possibility that works very well: map the function to a screen corner. Then picking a window can be done by reaching for the mouse, throwing it (say) up and to the left, then pointing to the desired window and clicking.
I have my top-left corner mapped to tile windows, and my top-right mapped to move all the windows out of the way.
You may have the two major parts - anti-circumvention and ISP liability limitation - of the DMCA confused or conflated when you dismiss the efficiacy of a counterclaim.
The anti-circumvention provisions are contained in Title I of the DMCA. It states, in part: "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that...is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title..." (17 USC 1201).
DMCA notices and counter-notices are covered by Title II. A DMCA notice must contain "Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site." (17 USC 512). Title II refers only to copyright infringement, which is a distinct act from trafficking in a circumvention device.
Subtle point: I don't think that you can combine the two into one. Apple doesn't allege that PlayFair infringes its copyrights - after all, Apple did not write PlayFair, nor is PlayFair a derived work of anything Apple wrote. PlayFair itself is copyrighted by its authors, not Apple. It may or may not infringe on Apple's Title I "paracopyright," but this is a separate issue from infringing on actual copyrights, and so I don't think that Title II covers it.
If the PlayFair people wanted, I think they could send a DMCA counter-notice to SourceForge indicating that they are not infringing on Apple's copyrights.
Depends on your dialect. If you pronounce it "con-tro-ver-see-al," then you're right; if (as dictionary.com suggests) you say "con-tro-ver-shall," then the author is right.
Apple's specs page
See "Capacity," which advertises "4GB, 15GB, 20GB or 40GB hard disk drive."
It helps, for the 3-D version, to visualize a square sheet of rubber with some thickness, rather than a cube. My visualizing intuition didn't want to swallow the idea of a rubber cube that was stretchy enough so that one face could be pulled around to touch the other.
"I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the elimination of the Taliban. I thought that group was a clear and present danger to the United States, and I supported what the President did."
-- Howard Dean, interview with truthout
True, and true. Please note that I was responding to someone advocating pen-and-paper, non-computer ballots.
One of the biggest reasons? Blind people. DRE machines are *huge* for blind people, because they can be supplemented with an audio interface that help them vote unassisted. Computer-mediated voting allows any number of interfaces to be presented in order to overcome various disabilities.
Some of the biggest advocates for DRE machines have been advocates for the blind and other disabled people who have previously required help at the polls.
I figured that one too, when I saw the name. It might not mean "the opposite of integrity" but it sure does draw a nice distinction.
If integrity is right behavior due to moral values within, extegrity is right behavior due to a system of rules imposed from without. Sounds about like what the product they're hawking is for.
I've also encountered Extegrity's product, which is required at my law school. It does have at least rudimentary protection against the most obvious workarounds - when I tried to run it within VMWare, it "failed security check" and refused to operate. I'm not sure how exactly it checks to see if it's running in a virtualized environment - one project I have on my back-burner is to see how well it deals with bochs.
.doc files. OpenOffice hasn't failed me yet, though, and of course Word for the Mac exists and is frequently available at a steep discount to students.
I'm also the proud owner of a PowerBook. My solution was to trade some other computer gear for a big old PC laptop with a mostly-dead battery that meets the system requirements. I plan to use that laptop only for taking exams. Aside from exams, my school is fairly platform-agnostic: papers are turned in on paper, and the only electronic interaction with professors is via email. The one kink that I have run into is profs and fellow students who insist on sharing their academic insight via Word
The primary difference is that ATMs keep detailed logs that are constantly checked and counter-checked, and among the things logged is the putative identity of the person who took money out. If an ATM gives out $1500 to a particular person, there's a starting point for an investigation. As a result, potential attackers are chary of a whole class of attacks - those that risk disclosing their identitites. It just isn't that way with voting systems, which have anonymity built right in. This makes the security problems harder - you're welding the accuracy and accountability demands of an ATM network to the anonymity demands of the secret ballot. No one is allowed to know that it was me who cast that particular ballot, and the information that might prove it must be thrown away as quickly as possible after it's generated.
Oh, yeah, and voting machines must be lightweight, so that they can be rolled out into thousands of polling stations and rolled back after election day. ATMs are armored safes permanently bricked into buildings. That sort of physical security makes infeasible a whole host of security problems - theft, modification, vandalism among them.
And there's no higher power to appeal to - no bank president who can decide that it's not worth the loss of goodwill to follow up on the occasional apparent $1500 giveaway, or that someone who claims a "phantom withdrawal" should be refunded without exacting proof of anything wrong happening. Patchy measures are fine in business, as long as everybody ends up more or less happy, but have no place in elections.
And if ATMs break, banks are out millions or even billions of dollars, so they pay top dollar to make sure that they don't break. What happens if voting machines break? Who's motivated to pay to avoid that consequence?
It's a much, much harder security problem both intrinsically and put into its practical context.
In 20 or 30 years, computers, telephones, and televisions will become part of our intimate clothing...
Victoria's Secret to merge with Fry's. Film at 11.
Just thought of something else. Even if you don't see an intrinsic difference between the GPS tracker and a 24-hour police tail, the GPS still has more functionality that makes it harder to justify as an investigatory measure that should be available without a warrant.
A police officer tailing you without a warrant may not follow you onto private property where he does not have permission to go. If you turn into the driveway of your thousand-acre ranch that's surrounded by vision-obscuring terrain like hills or trees, he cannot follow in order to see whether you're going to the ranch house or the isolated spot where they think the body or drugs or whatever are hidden.
The GPS tracker, however, will blithely continue to broadcast your coordinates, giving the police more information about your movements than our hypothetical, Constitutionally sound tail cop would be able to learn.
The only way to bring a remedy to this situation would be to have a database encompassing everywhere the suspect might possibly go, dividing space into points our tailing cop might be able to see from a public vantage point and points he would not be able to see. The information that the tracker emitted when the suspect was in protected areas would have to be thrown out before anyone with the investigation could view the GPS logs. This would restore the GPS tracker to the capacity of an infinitely skilled police tail who nonetheless respects the suspect's privacy rights.
It should be clear that the above scheme is utterly ridiculous and could never work. And because such a scheme is the only means for safeguarding the rights of a suspect when he goes onto private property, the GPS tracker may not be used without a warrant at all.
[Note: the Court of Appeals is the lower court being overruled here]
I'm starting to think that we need the equivalent of a national sign ordinance for advertisement as a whole.
If you own a factory, and you spew pollution into the air and it goes over onto my property, then you've violated my rights and the rights of everyone around you. You've taken a public good (the clean air that we all share) and diminished it.
Government exists, in part, to maintain public goods and see that those who diminish them pay for it. If you pollute the air, we have ways to make you bear the cost you've placed on society - in econmic terms, we've eliminated a negative externality.
Over-advertisement also constitutes a negative externality. As our perceptual space becomes more and more filled with the products of marketers, everyone is worse off. I'm worse off because of the telemarking calls and spam that I receive, the billboards that mar my view on the highway, the cross-advertisement that I have to bear due to marketing agreements between companies. The rapacity of the marketing I'm exposed to increases over time. Advertisers have entered into an arms race, with each ramping up the intrusiveness of their propaganda so that they can have a leg-up on other advertisers using less intrusive methods. Nowhere is this more clear than in the progression of advertisement methods on the 'Net: first static banner ads, then animated banner ads, then pop-up windows, then adware that doesn't even require a web browser. The advertisement gets more and more intrusive, builds to a fever pitch. Advertisers are worse off, because they have to spend more and more time constructing advertising methods to one-up the competiton; consumers are worse off because the volume of noise they're exposed to keeps increasing.
Wealthy towns in America have figured this out already, and instituted sign ordinances on businesses. You aren't allowed to have a sign be too tall, or too garish, or too obvious. The playing field is leveled at a lower point; all the businesses compete for customers on a fair plane, and the residents of the town are much better off due to the beautification of their town's commercial district.
This anti-telemarking legislation falls into the same area. It levels the playing field for companies (though it fails to work for everyone; some classes of business aren't affected), and makes things better off on all consumers with telephones. Since the corporations are held in check by the rules, they know that, while they cannot use telemarking as a tool to gain market share, neither can their competitors. Almost everyone benefits in this arrangement; the losers are firms established for the purpose of engaging in telemarketing. But we as a society have decided that telemarketing is bad, and so it's okay for these companies to lose, just as it's okay for companies that commit fraud or sell bad products to lose.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in the discussion, the US has the least to gain from switching over to IPv6. Since the Internet is, after all, a mostly American invention, there is some US-centricity to it, especially in the DNS system and in the allocation of IP addresses. Amercians own more IPv4 addresses than the rest of the world combined. We have the least to gain from going IPv6, and the most to lose.
I freely admit this is somewhat of a bad thing.
In the last few years, IP addresses have become a scarce resource that people are willing to pay for. Demand is literally outstripping supply, and you can tell it is because people are paying good money for blocks of addresses. (Down at a more personal level, you'll pay more for a broadband connection with a static IP address.) People are buying numbers. This isn't something the designers of the Internet, who foresaw a system with a few tens of millions of nodes at most, could have anticipated. They didn't imagine that every Chinese citizen might want to wander around with a cell phone connected to the 'Net.
There are infinitely many numbers, so it's basically pointless to compete economically over them. The right answer from an efficiency standpoint is to transition to IPv6. Sure, it'll be a pain in the butt as we get it done, but the rewards will be significant.
It's just the same in this case: the hobby store probably had an agreement to destroy unsold patterns, and violated that agreement by simply discarding the patterns. As a result of that violation, anyone who wanted to could legally take ownership of the discarded patterns - and this company did.
That's the copyright case. The paracopyright (DMCA) case has no leg to stand on, because there was no actual copyright infringement. The right answer, before running off to court, is to send a DMCA counter-notice stating that McCall's does not own the copyright to the web pages in question. These pages are copyrighted, not by McCall's, but by Monsterpatterns; they do not themselves contain the copyrighted patterns. (If Monsterpatterns were disseminating the patterns themselves on their website, then this would constitute copyright infringement, since digitial distribution implies that a copy is made. The same is not true of distribution of envelopes that are not copied.)