If your laptop gets fried, that is the fault of your laptop for not having any over-current protection on the USB power lines. The bad cable just tells the other device that your laptop can provide more power than it actually can.
The correct law for this is trademark law. USB is a trademark. Amazon is probably doing this because the USB Implementers Forum (owner of the mark) threatened them for selling counterfeit goods.
You seem to be confusing the standard with the implementation. The standard says 'in this mode, you must be able to supply at least x amps of current'. It does not need to specify what happens if something tries to pull more current than that - that is up to the implementation. For the 'damaged hardware' scenario you need a bigger load than the supply can handle (which can happen if the cable lies about how much power can be provided) AND a poor implementation that does not protect itself from over-current. Neither of those conditions are the fault of the standard.
Are you aware that the word 'hub' existed in the english language long before it took on a technical meaning? The device is supposed to be used as the 'central point' (AKA hub) of a conference room.
Where is such a law? In NYS, for instance, the law says that a driver must give the right of way to a pedestrian in a crosswalk. And there have been a few cases recently where a car hit a pedestrian and the pedestrian was cited and the driver was not. In one case the pedestrian was crossing the street and not in a crosswalk, and in the other case the pedestrian was walking on the wrong side of the road.
We refer to the holiday as the 4th of July. We refer to the date it occurs on as July 4. Probably started doing that precisely so it doesn't sound like just any old date.
If you want to claim copyright for your own works, you have to honor the copyright claims of others
In order for that sentence to make any sense at all, two things must be true: copyright must exist, and 'you' have a CHOICE (notice the IF in your statement) as to whether you want enforce it or not.
Then you said:
if you do not attempt to claim copyright on your own works, others cannot press any copyright claims against you
So, copyright still exists, you still have a choice as to whether or not to enforce, but NOBODY ELSE has the same choice. WTF???
Copyright IS uniform and universal. Nobody has to 'claim' anything. EVERYBODY has the right to create things, and EVERYBODY gets the SAME protections for the things they created. You don't have to do ANYTHING to get a copyright except create something. And the protection you get is that YOU control your creation and the distribution of it. What you do with that control is entirely up to YOU. You can give it to the world for free, no strings attached. You can give it to the world for 'free', with strings attached (eg GPL). You can keep it to yourself entirely. You can SELL your work.
Those questions are pretty much what the paper is about. One of the examples given was a marine salvage case, where a salvage team found a shipwreck that was about a mile and a half deep. It was too deep/too dangerous to dive, so they sent some autonomous subs down. Then they went to court to keep other salvagers away. The court decided that because the people were right above the wreck, and sending humans down was dangerous, the robots could stand in for the humans. The other salvagers were ordered to stay away, just like they would be if humans were diving. But it then raises the question: what if the humans had been on land? Would it still count? Tricky questions.
You are still not getting it. In the example you gave, everyone who purchased that additive was able to set their OWN price when selling the gas to their customers. Some retailers may have marked up the price of the additive 30%, some 50%, some 10%. The MFN contracts did not control what the retailers could do. Regardless of whether or not the retailers all paid the same price they could COMPETE with each other on price.
The Apple MFN contract did not do that. The Apple MFN contract fixed the price at which ALL retailers could SELL their goods, not the price at which they could BUY them. The retailers no longer had control of their own businesses, that control had been taken away by a contract they were not even a party to. That contract ELIMINATED the possibility of any price competition.
If someone is willing to buy a book for $9.99, and someone else is willing to sell it for $9.99, then by definition the market price is $9.99. There is no requirement at all that the seller makes money (or even breaks even) on the deal.
Selling below cost is not predatory pricing. Predatory pricing is setting the price below cost to force others out of business so that you can RAISE prices in the future. Amazon's low prices may indeed keep competitors out of the business NOW, but that is not in any way illegal, it is just competition. Since there is almost no barrier to entry at all in the ebook retailing business, the moment Amazon tries to raise prices competitors will appear. Since they are effectively prevented from significantly raising prices in the future, predatory pricing can not be claimed.
Selling below cost happens quite often. Actual predatory pricing is quite rare.
Again I say, READ THE DOCUMENTS. The only reason the publishers met with Apple at all was because they hated Amazon's $9.99 price for ebooks, because it was a threat to their hardcover sales. That 'threat' is called competition. Far from LOWERING the price to Amazon, they RAISED the price above $9.99 in an effort to force Amazon to raise prices, which they did not do. This was BEFORE they ever talked to Apple.
Microsoft did NOT get in trouble for using its dominance in OS to push its browser. It got in trouble for anti-competitive behavior when it had a dominance in one area (OS) to gain dominance in another (browser). In the MS case, the anti-competitive behavior included things like changing the Windows APIs and not telling the competitors until after MS had a head start on its browser, using undocumented APIs to improve the performance of their browser while withholding that info from the competitors, etc. MS totally controlled the fate of their competitors.
Amazon being a seller AND a publisher is in no way an anti-trust violation, unless there is some anti-competitive behavior. 'Hey authors, let Amazon do your publishing, we will give you a better deal' is COMPETITIVE. The other publishers are free to sweeten their deals, Amazon is not in control. If all the authors leave their publishers, tough. They have been out-competed. 'Hey authors, unless you let Amazon publish, your books will not be sold in the worlds largest bookstore' is ANTICOMPETITIVE. The other publishers can do NOTHING to counter that. THAT is illegal.
Putting your competitors in unsustainable positions is most certainly NOT what anti-trust laws are about. That is just competition. Putting competitors in positions where you have CONTROL of the competitor is what anti-trust laws are about. Amazon has done nothing to suggest they are in control of their competitors.
Read the court documents. While Amazon may have WANTED the publishers to sell to them at a lower price, the publishers REFUSED to do so. The beef the publishers had with Amazon was that Amazon's ebook prices made it harder for the publishers to sell HARDCOVER books. Well, so what? What 'right' do the publishers have to sell a desired quantity of hardcover books? Amazon did not get people to switch to ebooks by doing something illegal or shady, they did it by offering a better product. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Anti-trust laws have nothing to do with protecting someones desired business model, they are not primarily about consumers, and they have nothing to do with protecting producers. They are there to ensure that competition can exist (not that it DOES exist, just that it CAN). Amazon did nothing to ensure competition could not exist. It may be HARD to compete with Amazon, but it is not impossible. What Apple did was to ensure that there was no possibility of competition.
In a normal MFN deal between Apple and a publisher, the only two parties affected by the deal are Apple and the publisher. In this scheme, Apples MFN contract controlled the price that a consumer had to pay Amazon to buy a book, even though neither one of them was party to the contract.
It is pretty typical to have a MFN clause for things you BUY. This tends to lower prices. Apple arranged for MFN on things it and its competitors SOLD. This raises prices because it is IMPOSSIBLE, not merely painful, for anyone to compete on price.
Amazon does not dictate price. Amazons buys books from the publisher and resells them for whatever price Amazon wants. They can buy a book for $5 and sell it for $10, or they can buy it or $5 and sell it for $2. And all of their competitors can sell books for whatever price the competitors want. The pressure Amazon can exert is on the publishers, to get the best price. But the competitors are still free to set their own prices, even if it may be painful to compete with Amazon.
Of course, this model is intolerable to Apple. There is no shiny to be sold with an ebook. A book purchased from Amazon is indistinguishable from one purchased from Apple! The only way for Apple to compete would be on price! The horror!
So, what Apple did was go to the publishers and get them to change to the agency model. No longer would the publishers sell to the retailers with the retailers setting their own prices. The PUBLISHER would set the price to the CONSUMER, and the retailer would get a cut of that. Apple would get its 30%. So far, no real problem. Here is where the problem occurs - Apple made deals with the publishers that NOBODY could SELL a book for less than Apples price. Even if a competitor was willing to take a smaller cut the price to the consumer could not fall, the publisher just kept more. Prices were, wait for it, fixed.
In what way are 'tea leafs' better than random chance? In a blind, controlled study, this performed 63% better than random. What is the increase for your 'tea leafs'? Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
If you use the hand sanitizer/hand washing, you MIGHT not get ALL the germs. If you DON'T use it, you DEFINITELY won't get ANY of them. See the difference?
I am not aware of any norovirus outbreak on a cruise ship that was tied to the food. Norovirus is spread by two groups of idiots: those who don't wash their hands after using the bathroom, and those who don't wash their hands prior to eating. You would not believe the number of people who not only pass by the hand sanitizer they offer at the entry to dining rooms, but also REFUSE to use it even when requested by a crew member.
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If your laptop gets fried, that is the fault of your laptop for not having any over-current protection on the USB power lines. The bad cable just tells the other device that your laptop can provide more power than it actually can.
The correct law for this is trademark law. USB is a trademark. Amazon is probably doing this because the USB Implementers Forum (owner of the mark) threatened them for selling counterfeit goods.
You seem to be confusing the standard with the implementation. The standard says 'in this mode, you must be able to supply at least x amps of current'. It does not need to specify what happens if something tries to pull more current than that - that is up to the implementation. For the 'damaged hardware' scenario you need a bigger load than the supply can handle (which can happen if the cable lies about how much power can be provided) AND a poor implementation that does not protect itself from over-current. Neither of those conditions are the fault of the standard.
Are you aware that the word 'hub' existed in the english language long before it took on a technical meaning? The device is supposed to be used as the 'central point' (AKA hub) of a conference room.
Where is such a law? In NYS, for instance, the law says that a driver must give the right of way to a pedestrian in a crosswalk. And there have been a few cases recently where a car hit a pedestrian and the pedestrian was cited and the driver was not. In one case the pedestrian was crossing the street and not in a crosswalk, and in the other case the pedestrian was walking on the wrong side of the road.
Does DAB use a scheme like satellite radio, where the same data is sent a second time after a delay? If not, what is the point of buffering?
We refer to the holiday as the 4th of July. We refer to the date it occurs on as July 4. Probably started doing that precisely so it doesn't sound like just any old date.
How is it 'wrong'? Language is determined by how people use it.
You said:
If you want to claim copyright for your own works, you have to honor the copyright claims of others
In order for that sentence to make any sense at all, two things must be true: copyright must exist, and 'you' have a CHOICE (notice the IF in your statement) as to whether you want enforce it or not.
Then you said :
if you do not attempt to claim copyright on your own works, others cannot press any copyright claims against you
So, copyright still exists, you still have a choice as to whether or not to enforce, but NOBODY ELSE has the same choice. WTF???
Copyright IS uniform and universal. Nobody has to 'claim' anything. EVERYBODY has the right to create things, and EVERYBODY gets the SAME protections for the things they created. You don't have to do ANYTHING to get a copyright except create something. And the protection you get is that YOU control your creation and the distribution of it. What you do with that control is entirely up to YOU. You can give it to the world for free, no strings attached. You can give it to the world for 'free', with strings attached (eg GPL). You can keep it to yourself entirely. You can SELL your work.
So you think you can take away my rights by not using yours?? Nope.
So a refrigerator is a robot? Transition eyeglass lenses are robots? Amplifiers with a feedback loop are robots?
Those questions are pretty much what the paper is about. One of the examples given was a marine salvage case, where a salvage team found a shipwreck that was about a mile and a half deep. It was too deep/too dangerous to dive, so they sent some autonomous subs down. Then they went to court to keep other salvagers away. The court decided that because the people were right above the wreck, and sending humans down was dangerous, the robots could stand in for the humans. The other salvagers were ordered to stay away, just like they would be if humans were diving. But it then raises the question: what if the humans had been on land? Would it still count? Tricky questions.
You are still not getting it. In the example you gave, everyone who purchased that additive was able to set their OWN price when selling the gas to their customers. Some retailers may have marked up the price of the additive 30%, some 50%, some 10%. The MFN contracts did not control what the retailers could do. Regardless of whether or not the retailers all paid the same price they could COMPETE with each other on price.
The Apple MFN contract did not do that. The Apple MFN contract fixed the price at which ALL retailers could SELL their goods, not the price at which they could BUY them. The retailers no longer had control of their own businesses, that control had been taken away by a contract they were not even a party to. That contract ELIMINATED the possibility of any price competition.
If someone is willing to buy a book for $9.99, and someone else is willing to sell it for $9.99, then by definition the market price is $9.99. There is no requirement at all that the seller makes money (or even breaks even) on the deal.
Selling below cost is not predatory pricing. Predatory pricing is setting the price below cost to force others out of business so that you can RAISE prices in the future. Amazon's low prices may indeed keep competitors out of the business NOW, but that is not in any way illegal, it is just competition. Since there is almost no barrier to entry at all in the ebook retailing business, the moment Amazon tries to raise prices competitors will appear. Since they are effectively prevented from significantly raising prices in the future, predatory pricing can not be claimed.
Selling below cost happens quite often. Actual predatory pricing is quite rare.
Again I say, READ THE DOCUMENTS. The only reason the publishers met with Apple at all was because they hated Amazon's $9.99 price for ebooks, because it was a threat to their hardcover sales. That 'threat' is called competition. Far from LOWERING the price to Amazon, they RAISED the price above $9.99 in an effort to force Amazon to raise prices, which they did not do. This was BEFORE they ever talked to Apple.
Microsoft did NOT get in trouble for using its dominance in OS to push its browser. It got in trouble for anti-competitive behavior when it had a dominance in one area (OS) to gain dominance in another (browser). In the MS case, the anti-competitive behavior included things like changing the Windows APIs and not telling the competitors until after MS had a head start on its browser, using undocumented APIs to improve the performance of their browser while withholding that info from the competitors, etc. MS totally controlled the fate of their competitors.
Amazon being a seller AND a publisher is in no way an anti-trust violation, unless there is some anti-competitive behavior. 'Hey authors, let Amazon do your publishing, we will give you a better deal' is COMPETITIVE. The other publishers are free to sweeten their deals, Amazon is not in control. If all the authors leave their publishers, tough. They have been out-competed. 'Hey authors, unless you let Amazon publish, your books will not be sold in the worlds largest bookstore' is ANTICOMPETITIVE. The other publishers can do NOTHING to counter that. THAT is illegal.
Putting your competitors in unsustainable positions is most certainly NOT what anti-trust laws are about. That is just competition. Putting competitors in positions where you have CONTROL of the competitor is what anti-trust laws are about. Amazon has done nothing to suggest they are in control of their competitors.
Read the court documents. While Amazon may have WANTED the publishers to sell to them at a lower price, the publishers REFUSED to do so. The beef the publishers had with Amazon was that Amazon's ebook prices made it harder for the publishers to sell HARDCOVER books. Well, so what? What 'right' do the publishers have to sell a desired quantity of hardcover books? Amazon did not get people to switch to ebooks by doing something illegal or shady, they did it by offering a better product. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Anti-trust laws have nothing to do with protecting someones desired business model, they are not primarily about consumers, and they have nothing to do with protecting producers. They are there to ensure that competition can exist (not that it DOES exist, just that it CAN). Amazon did nothing to ensure competition could not exist. It may be HARD to compete with Amazon, but it is not impossible. What Apple did was to ensure that there was no possibility of competition.
In a normal MFN deal between Apple and a publisher, the only two parties affected by the deal are Apple and the publisher. In this scheme, Apples MFN contract controlled the price that a consumer had to pay Amazon to buy a book, even though neither one of them was party to the contract.
It is pretty typical to have a MFN clause for things you BUY. This tends to lower prices. Apple arranged for MFN on things it and its competitors SOLD. This raises prices because it is IMPOSSIBLE, not merely painful, for anyone to compete on price.
Amazon does not dictate price. Amazons buys books from the publisher and resells them for whatever price Amazon wants. They can buy a book for $5 and sell it for $10, or they can buy it or $5 and sell it for $2. And all of their competitors can sell books for whatever price the competitors want. The pressure Amazon can exert is on the publishers, to get the best price. But the competitors are still free to set their own prices, even if it may be painful to compete with Amazon.
Of course, this model is intolerable to Apple. There is no shiny to be sold with an ebook. A book purchased from Amazon is indistinguishable from one purchased from Apple! The only way for Apple to compete would be on price! The horror!
So, what Apple did was go to the publishers and get them to change to the agency model. No longer would the publishers sell to the retailers with the retailers setting their own prices. The PUBLISHER would set the price to the CONSUMER, and the retailer would get a cut of that. Apple would get its 30%. So far, no real problem. Here is where the problem occurs - Apple made deals with the publishers that NOBODY could SELL a book for less than Apples price. Even if a competitor was willing to take a smaller cut the price to the consumer could not fall, the publisher just kept more. Prices were, wait for it, fixed.
Ha ha! Good one! Apple did it so they didn't have to compete on price, and for no other reason.
Such as?
In what way are 'tea leafs' better than random chance? In a blind, controlled study, this performed 63% better than random. What is the increase for your 'tea leafs'? Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
If you use the hand sanitizer/hand washing, you MIGHT not get ALL the germs. If you DON'T use it, you DEFINITELY won't get ANY of them. See the difference?
I am not aware of any norovirus outbreak on a cruise ship that was tied to the food. Norovirus is spread by two groups of idiots: those who don't wash their hands after using the bathroom, and those who don't wash their hands prior to eating. You would not believe the number of people who not only pass by the hand sanitizer they offer at the entry to dining rooms, but also REFUSE to use it even when requested by a crew member.