As you correctly point out, this thread is slightly offtopic. However, the biggest problem with internet voting is not technical but human: if you let people vote away from the supervised environs of a polling place then you don't know who's family/boss/armed gunman is standing next to them to make sure they vote in the "right way".
For more information on the problems of internet voting, see this paper by the Australian Capital Territory Electoral Commissioner.
It is somewhat difficult to see what Yahoo! are hoping to achieve here. Is the question can France legislate extra-territorially? If so then the answer is presumably yes. The US, Australia and the UK all maintain the right to pass extra-territorial legislation, I presume the French do as well. For example, US anti-trust legislation has, I believe, extra-territorial effect.
The limitation on this is that (EU internal rules and possible future developments aside) judgements of courts in one country are not enforceable in the courts of other countries. So, the French court can rule that Yahoo! (US) has breached French law. The French authorities will enforce this judgement against Yahoo! (US) to the extent that they are in France (or, possibly, the rest of the EU). If French law allows judgements to be enforced against subsidiaries then they can go after Yahoo.fr too. US Authorities, however, will ignore the French judgement.
By the same token, a US court can rule that the French court's judgement is invalid at US law (or even French law). The French courts and authorities will presumably feel free to ignore the outcome.
So, Afghanistan can legislate to make pornography illegal in the US, but they have to get their hands on the offenders to do anything about it.
Not true. It is not necessary to sign contracts for them to have effect. What you need is offer, acceptance and consideration.
Consideration is not at issue here, in an employment contract, one side is (at least) offering work and the other side is (at least) offering payment.
The IP rights document provided by the company would be a part of their offer of an employment contract. Your signature is a part of the acceptance process. Offer, acceptance, consideration. Bingo. One contract. Absolutely no need for an employer signature.
If you/changed/ the offer the employer made, then you would need evidence of their acceptance of your counter-offer (such as a signature) but if you just signed the document they offered, you're fine.
Disclaimer, my legal training is from a different jurisdiction. However this chunk of the common law is sufficiently ancient that it probsbly predates the US anyway.
The confusion stems from copyright and related legal rights being referred to as "intellectual property". From a legal point of view, there are important similarities between physical and intellectual property.
A physical property right (such as what might loosely be called "ownership") is a bundle of rights pertaining to a particular object. Such rights include the right to possession, the right to destroy, the right to use and (for land) the right to crops growing on it. The rights may, subject to certain legal restrictions, be traded, given or leased either individually or together. For example, if you lease a house, you lease certain rights (the right to occupy for a certain period, for example) and the lessor keeps certain other rights.
An intellectual property right is a bundle of rights attached to a particular concept or to a particular expression of that concept. These rights may include the right to copy, the right to distribute for the first time and the right to publicly perform. These rights may, subject to certain legal restrictions, be traded, given or leased either individually or together.
Even the limitations on intellectual property rights (such as fair dealing, which Americans call fair use) have analogies in physical property. Your property may, for example, be subject to a public right of way: that is, your property right may be limited by the right of everyone else to use a path or road on your land without your permission.
It is therefore apparent that there are, from a legal point of view, important similarities between physical property and intellectual property which is why they share the name. The confusion comes because one of the most common and most obvious ways of interfering with a physical property right is to deprive the right owner of possession. This (loosely) is what theft is. There are other offences related to interfering in a property right, criminal damage, for example but theft seems to be the one that people think of.
Since interfering with a physical property right is commonly, if mistakenly, equated with theft, it is not really surprising that people often equate interfering with an intellectual property right with theft even though there is no deprivation of possession.
Walk into the bookshop of your nearest university and pull the IP textbook off the shelf. If it is a decent text it will go through the rationalle of the rules in depth as well as giving a much more in-depth treatment of the contents of IP law than you'll get in an essay or newspaper article.
And don't blame Clinton: McCain pushed this one through as a Rider to a big appropriations bill. Vetoing that bill would have been
very hard. Riders are a trick for passing bad law without going through the constitutional approval process.
You need s54 of our constitution:
54. The proposed law which appropriates revenue or moneys for the ordinary
annual services of the Government shall deal only with such appropriation.
In fact, since the writers of our constitution were well aware of the situation in the US, it's probably not a coincidence!
Even if the US has signed and ratified that instrument (it probably has), my understanding of US law (although I concede that, since I studied this in Sweden, I may well be wrong), is that international treaties are not directly enforceable in US courts. There are no general international courts for human rights so one can't go there. Some regions (notably Europe) have them but I'm not aware of one for the US. And, finally, you can't go to the ICJ in the Hague because individuals do not have standing before that court.
The proposed directive text as at May 1999 is here. I don't know who's slow, the reporter or the EUs webmasters:-(.
For those who don't enjoy reading EU directives, there's a Commission press release from 9 June 2000 here. Be warned, however, it is even more vague than the directive, especially on circumvention measures.
Can you cite the case. (sorry for being anal but I'm studying IT law for the next six months and it really helps me if I can get the actual judgements).
Im afraid I'm not quite sure what you're referring to. If you're talking about the capital costs of setting up the network infrastructure then my previous point stands: much of the internet was paid for by non-US governments and by US and non-US private interests.
If you want to talk about the expenditure in developing the technology behind that infrastructure, by no means all of it is American. Packet switching was at least partly invented in the UK, the web, famously, was invented at CERN. Linux, an OS used on many internet servers, was initially and primarily written by a Finn. Ethernet was invented by Xerox, a private firm.
These are just a few examples which demonstrate that at every level from abstract research through engineering to actually running the networks, there have been significant contributions by non-US Government parties both in the public and provate sector. The idea that the US taxpayer paid for everything to do with the internet and hence the US government has the sole right to regulate the internet is a myth. The US government is and has been a large important contributor to the internet, but its certainly not the only one and the rest of the world, which also contributed, has every right to demand a say in the running of the system.
Sorry, that's just not true. The US government payed for the original network which is now just one of the interconnected networks which makes up the internet. For example if I traceroute slashdot.org I find that my packets traverse AARNET (payed for by Australian Universities, which is to say be the Commonwealth Governament), Optus (majority Australian owned Cable+Wireless affiliate), Cable+Wireless (private US company) and Exodus (likewise, a private US company). In fact I find that the only taxpayer involved in that stream of packets is the Australian Taxpayer.
The internet is a HUGE project which has been payed for by public and private money from all over the world. Funnily enough, the rest of the world doesn't see why one of the contributors (albeit a large one) should have all the say.
To use your example of Micro$oft and AOL, it would be like them saying "Thank you for your investment in our operations, now get out of our shareholders' meeting because you're not American".
The doctine your talking about is called crown immunity --- Americans presumably have another name for it but the concept predates the US anyway. What it means in this context is that one level of government has no criminal or civil liability to any other level of government. It means, for example, that a federal government can't tax the property of a state government or - apparently - make them pay traffic fines.
What the ALA is doing is quite different. They're not really sueing the federal government at all. Instead, they are asking a court to declare that a law is beyond the power of congress and hence invalid. So even if they were an instrument of some level of government (which they're not) they would still be able to take this action. States take bring cases against Commonwealth legislation all the time here, I presume that it is the same in the US.
The TV licence basically is a tax - on television ownership. It's just a tax which is specifically earmarked for a particular purpose. It's really no worse than any other tax --- you have to pay tobacco tax (which is justified by the need to stop smoking at to pay for the health costs) even if you wish to buy the cigarettes for (for some bizarre reason) building model houses.
The BBC is an IMMENSELY popular institution and I suspect that the TV licence would be one of taxes easiest to justify to the public. I wish the Australian Government hadn't removed the licence fee here: the ABC is now dependant on funding from consolidated revenue and it's just a little too easy for the government to cut the budget.
You got it almost right. Actually, Browne would have been eliminated first as he had no first preference votes, but close enough.
The only country I know which uses this preferential system is Australia. Most European countries use some variant of the D'Hont proportional representation system which is party based and doesn't have preferences.
The preferential system is not actually proportional - in order to have PR you need to be electing more than one position. There are proportional systems which have preferences, one of the most popular is called Hare-Clark.
You are correct in identifying a problem in preferential voting. In fact, by Arrow's Theorem, there is no perfect voting system (Arrow's theorem is more technical but this is close enough.
The problem, if I might make it clearer, is that if you have (say) a big left party, a big right party and a small centre-left party with (say) 35%, 45% and 20% of the vote then roughly speeking the little party gets knocked out and the big left party wins. The problem is that the centre left party is probably most representative of the views of the electorate. Of course this is still better than first past-the-post as practiced in, for example, the US and Britain. In this case the right party would win even though they were the people that 55% of the population least wanted.
The level of democracy delivered by a voting system is relative, but the preferential system wins out over first past-the-post any day.
In what way is this different from elsewhere. Here there are a multitude of ways of getting access to university and, in fact, it is in some ways easier to get in if you are classified as "mature aged" rather than "school leaver". Once at university there is support available (although unfortunately it is means tested) to live on and what tuition fees there are are covered by a national non-means-tested interest free loans system wihch you pay back only if and when you start earning a certain amount of money. If you want to go to university and you have the brains and the dedication to apss the courses there are ways to do it.
As a student in the final year of a four year BSc. in Australia, I can say that our perception is that US undergraduate degrees are, for the most part, sub-standard but that a US PhD is a very serious qualification and many students choose to go to the US to complete doctorates.
The text books we use back up this perception. Since there are bugger all Australian university maths texts we use mainly US texts with the balance made up by a few UK books and translations of other foreign texts. In third and fourth year (and mainly in second year as well) these books are almost without exception flagged as US graduate books while the UK ones are typically flagged for third year undergrads.
The whole situation with international comparison of degrees is rather complicated and confusing. We have four year honours degrees rather like Scotland and these seem to be regarded as equivalent to English three year degrees because it is usual here to do 2 or 2.5 subjects instead of the English 1-1.5. UK universities appear to accept Australian Degrees on this basis.
In europe the situation is confused by the names given to degrees. For example, in Sweden (where I have also studied) an MSc. (Mat.-Nat. Mag.) is essentially indistinguishable from an Australian BSc. (Hons) but is styled as a higher degree. On the other, hand a german diploma in maths is an exceptionally scary qualification taking 4.5 or more years with an unbelievable workload.
Correct call - under proportional representation parties or groups recieve seats according to share of vote. It is not necessarily true, though, that you cast a vote for a party rather than an individual. The party method is common in Europe (for example in UK Euro elections) while for the Senate here you can either vote for a party or number all of the candidates and under the Hare-Clark system (used, for example, in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory) you have to number individual boxes.
The reason ICANN elections are not PR is not that they use preferential voting but that they only have one seat per electorate.
If you want to drink good Australian Beer, drink Coopers. Bottle conditioned and with a bit of flavour, not like VB, XXXX or (heaven forbid) Fosters. If you can't get Coopers then Toohey's Old is another good option.
Since this is an article about Canberra, I should also point out that for REALLY good Australian beer one need go no further than the the Wig and Pen in the city. They brew their own beer in a variety of styles and have a wall full of prizes for it. As a bonus, the Wig and Pen is around the corner from LinuxCare's Australian office and just off the campus of The Australian National University so it's perfectly placed for the geek about town in Canberra.
The Australian equivalent of the FCC is the Australian Communications Authority, formerly known as the Spectrum Management Authority. Hunting through their site, the only things I could see which appeared relevant were some stuff which implied you need a licence to broadcast in the 2300-2400MHz band and a class exemption for on-site office equipment (like conventional wave-lans, for an example). So it looks like you might need a licence to do this.
A small point for whoever suggested finding cheaper cards (and don't forget, that $150 was almost certainly in Australian Dollars), there are pretty tight restrictions on importation of radio devices to Australia. In particular, you need to make shure there is an ACA permit in force for that device.
A small trivia point for anyone else who lives in Canberra: I think the ACA have their offices in Belconnen in the Benjamin Offices.
Even if the licence states that the company may change it unilaterally, and even if the licence is made enforceable by some dodgy piece of legislation then the relevant clause is still void for uncertainty. You have to specify contractural terms in a pretty concrete manner. Just because UCITA plugs the acceptance hole in EULAs doesn't mean it fixes all the other problems.
\begin{disclaimer} I passed contracts at the ANU but I believe US common law is pretty similar to ours. \end{disclaimer}
On the contrary. If people do not wish to support parliament, they can vote informally. The point is that if you remove the option of not being bothered to do anything then the vast majority do actually choose to support someone rather than dropping a blank ballot paper in the box.
If you want MPs who really represent the population and who have to listen to the views of the entire population, this is a very effective method. On the mandate level, this means that parliament can claim to speak for around 95% of the adult population (rather than what, 40% in the US?).
The poster points out the problem of low turnout making politicians unrepresentative. Other posters point out the problem that voting for minor party candidates is a waste of vote. Australia has run into both of these problems and has come up with (at least partial) solutions.
The problem of low turnout really hit in the 1920s when turnout plummeted way below 50% and the mandate of parliament began to lack credibility. The solution - compulsorary voting. Here all adult citizens must attend a polling place on polling day. This approach stems from seeing voting as a responsibility as well as a right. Australia is a democracy and as such its citizens have the responsibility of running the country through their representatives. One has no more right to not show up on polling day than to decide not to pay tax. Of course one can still abstain by voting informally but very few do. Because everyone votes, politicans need to appeal to everyone by taking everyone's position into account.
The issue of third parties is solved by preferential voting and/or proportional representation. These voting mechanisms ensure that the membership of parliament better reflects the propotions of voters - so losing votes to a small party is important. Even where there are single member electorates, one can make a statement by voting for a minor candidate whom one really supports and preference the lesser of the remaining evils so that one's vote will count for them after the minor candidate has been eliminated.
Actually the previous poster was perfectly correct to describe breach of copyright as a crime against the nation, at least for the criminal part of copyright breach. All crimes are crimes against the nation, that's the key distinction between a crime and a tort.
One commits a tort against a victim but a crime is commited against the state. It is for this reason that criminal cases are styled R. v Foo (or, I believe, "the people" in the US) rather than Victim v Foo.
The question of whether breach of copyright should be criminal, OTOH, is another matter...
Having read clause six the words that spring to mind are "void for uncertainty". While I would not claim expertise in Virginian contract law (cf choice of law in clause 24 *), if it falls in line with the rest of the common law world any clause vesting absolute discretion to vary the contract after formation is invalid and will be severed.
* In some jurisdictions if your purchase of a domain name is deemed a consumer transaction (in Australia as a transaction under $A40,000 this would be ofr virtually everyone) then the choice of law clause may also be invalid and you may have the right to have the agreement considered under your local law.
Slashdot Mirror
For more information on the problems of internet voting, see this paper by the Australian Capital Territory Electoral Commissioner.
The limitation on this is that (EU internal rules and possible future developments aside) judgements of courts in one country are not enforceable in the courts of other countries. So, the French court can rule that Yahoo! (US) has breached French law. The French authorities will enforce this judgement against Yahoo! (US) to the extent that they are in France (or, possibly, the rest of the EU). If French law allows judgements to be enforced against subsidiaries then they can go after Yahoo.fr too. US Authorities, however, will ignore the French judgement.
By the same token, a US court can rule that the French court's judgement is invalid at US law (or even French law). The French courts and authorities will presumably feel free to ignore the outcome.
So, Afghanistan can legislate to make pornography illegal in the US, but they have to get their hands on the offenders to do anything about it.
Not true. It is not necessary to sign contracts for them to have effect. What you need is offer, acceptance and consideration. Consideration is not at issue here, in an employment contract, one side is (at least) offering work and the other side is (at least) offering payment. The IP rights document provided by the company would be a part of their offer of an employment contract. Your signature is a part of the acceptance process. Offer, acceptance, consideration. Bingo. One contract. Absolutely no need for an employer signature. If you /changed/ the offer the employer made, then you would need evidence of their acceptance of your counter-offer (such as a signature) but if you just signed the document they offered, you're fine.
Disclaimer, my legal training is from a different jurisdiction. However this chunk of the common law is sufficiently ancient that it probsbly predates the US anyway.
A physical property right (such as what might loosely be called "ownership") is a bundle of rights pertaining to a particular object. Such rights include the right to possession, the right to destroy, the right to use and (for land) the right to crops growing on it. The rights may, subject to certain legal restrictions, be traded, given or leased either individually or together. For example, if you lease a house, you lease certain rights (the right to occupy for a certain period, for example) and the lessor keeps certain other rights.
An intellectual property right is a bundle of rights attached to a particular concept or to a particular expression of that concept. These rights may include the right to copy, the right to distribute for the first time and the right to publicly perform. These rights may, subject to certain legal restrictions, be traded, given or leased either individually or together.
Even the limitations on intellectual property rights (such as fair dealing, which Americans call fair use) have analogies in physical property. Your property may, for example, be subject to a public right of way: that is, your property right may be limited by the right of everyone else to use a path or road on your land without your permission.
It is therefore apparent that there are, from a legal point of view, important similarities between physical property and intellectual property which is why they share the name. The confusion comes because one of the most common and most obvious ways of interfering with a physical property right is to deprive the right owner of possession. This (loosely) is what theft is. There are other offences related to interfering in a property right, criminal damage, for example but theft seems to be the one that people think of.
Since interfering with a physical property right is commonly, if mistakenly, equated with theft, it is not really surprising that people often equate interfering with an intellectual property right with theft even though there is no deprivation of possession.
Walk into the bookshop of your nearest university and pull the IP textbook off the shelf. If it is a decent text it will go through the rationalle of the rules in depth as well as giving a much more in-depth treatment of the contents of IP law than you'll get in an essay or newspaper article.
Nope, sorry. Women first got the right to vote in South Australia. New Zealand was the first whole country to give women the vote.
You need s54 of our constitution:
In fact, since the writers of our constitution were well aware of the situation in the US, it's probably not a coincidence!
Even if the US has signed and ratified that instrument (it probably has), my understanding of US law (although I concede that, since I studied this in Sweden, I may well be wrong), is that international treaties are not directly enforceable in US courts. There are no general international courts for human rights so one can't go there. Some regions (notably Europe) have them but I'm not aware of one for the US. And, finally, you can't go to the ICJ in the Hague because individuals do not have standing before that court.
For those who don't enjoy reading EU directives, there's a Commission press release from 9 June 2000 here. Be warned, however, it is even more vague than the directive, especially on circumvention measures.
Can you cite the case. (sorry for being anal but I'm studying IT law for the next six months and it really helps me if I can get the actual judgements).
If you want to talk about the expenditure in developing the technology behind that infrastructure, by no means all of it is American. Packet switching was at least partly invented in the UK, the web, famously, was invented at CERN. Linux, an OS used on many internet servers, was initially and primarily written by a Finn. Ethernet was invented by Xerox, a private firm.
These are just a few examples which demonstrate that at every level from abstract research through engineering to actually running the networks, there have been significant contributions by non-US Government parties both in the public and provate sector. The idea that the US taxpayer paid for everything to do with the internet and hence the US government has the sole right to regulate the internet is a myth. The US government is and has been a large important contributor to the internet, but its certainly not the only one and the rest of the world, which also contributed, has every right to demand a say in the running of the system.
The internet is a HUGE project which has been payed for by public and private money from all over the world. Funnily enough, the rest of the world doesn't see why one of the contributors (albeit a large one) should have all the say.
To use your example of Micro$oft and AOL, it would be like them saying "Thank you for your investment in our operations, now get out of our shareholders' meeting because you're not American".
What the ALA is doing is quite different. They're not really sueing the federal government at all. Instead, they are asking a court to declare that a law is beyond the power of congress and hence invalid. So even if they were an instrument of some level of government (which they're not) they would still be able to take this action. States take bring cases against Commonwealth legislation all the time here, I presume that it is the same in the US.
Usual disclaimer: I am only a law student.
The BBC is an IMMENSELY popular institution and I suspect that the TV licence would be one of taxes easiest to justify to the public. I wish the Australian Government hadn't removed the licence fee here: the ABC is now dependant on funding from consolidated revenue and it's just a little too easy for the government to cut the budget.
The only country I know which uses this preferential system is Australia. Most European countries use some variant of the D'Hont proportional representation system which is party based and doesn't have preferences.
The preferential system is not actually proportional - in order to have PR you need to be electing more than one position. There are proportional systems which have preferences, one of the most popular is called Hare-Clark.
You are correct in identifying a problem in preferential voting. In fact, by Arrow's Theorem, there is no perfect voting system (Arrow's theorem is more technical but this is close enough.
The problem, if I might make it clearer, is that if you have (say) a big left party, a big right party and a small centre-left party with (say) 35%, 45% and 20% of the vote then roughly speeking the little party gets knocked out and the big left party wins. The problem is that the centre left party is probably most representative of the views of the electorate. Of course this is still better than first past-the-post as practiced in, for example, the US and Britain. In this case the right party would win even though they were the people that 55% of the population least wanted.
The level of democracy delivered by a voting system is relative, but the preferential system wins out over first past-the-post any day.
For more information on preferential voting see the Australian Electoral Commission.
In what way is this different from elsewhere. Here there are a multitude of ways of getting access to university and, in fact, it is in some ways easier to get in if you are classified as "mature aged" rather than "school leaver". Once at university there is support available (although unfortunately it is means tested) to live on and what tuition fees there are are covered by a national non-means-tested interest free loans system wihch you pay back only if and when you start earning a certain amount of money. If you want to go to university and you have the brains and the dedication to apss the courses there are ways to do it.
The text books we use back up this perception. Since there are bugger all Australian university maths texts we use mainly US texts with the balance made up by a few UK books and translations of other foreign texts. In third and fourth year (and mainly in second year as well) these books are almost without exception flagged as US graduate books while the UK ones are typically flagged for third year undergrads.
The whole situation with international comparison of degrees is rather complicated and confusing. We have four year honours degrees rather like Scotland and these seem to be regarded as equivalent to English three year degrees because it is usual here to do 2 or 2.5 subjects instead of the English 1-1.5. UK universities appear to accept Australian Degrees on this basis.
In europe the situation is confused by the names given to degrees. For example, in Sweden (where I have also studied) an MSc. (Mat.-Nat. Mag.) is essentially indistinguishable from an Australian BSc. (Hons) but is styled as a higher degree. On the other, hand a german diploma in maths is an exceptionally scary qualification taking 4.5 or more years with an unbelievable workload.
The reason ICANN elections are not PR is not that they use preferential voting but that they only have one seat per electorate.
Since this is an article about Canberra, I should also point out that for REALLY good Australian beer one need go no further than the the Wig and Pen in the city. They brew their own beer in a variety of styles and have a wall full of prizes for it. As a bonus, the Wig and Pen is around the corner from LinuxCare's Australian office and just off the campus of The Australian National University so it's perfectly placed for the geek about town in Canberra.
A small point for whoever suggested finding cheaper cards (and don't forget, that $150 was almost certainly in Australian Dollars), there are pretty tight restrictions on importation of radio devices to Australia. In particular, you need to make shure there is an ACA permit in force for that device.
A small trivia point for anyone else who lives in Canberra: I think the ACA have their offices in Belconnen in the Benjamin Offices.
\begin{disclaimer}
I passed contracts at the ANU but I believe US common law is pretty similar to ours.
\end{disclaimer}
If you want MPs who really represent the population and who have to listen to the views of the entire population, this is a very effective method. On the mandate level, this means that parliament can claim to speak for around 95% of the adult population (rather than what, 40% in the US?).
The problem of low turnout really hit in the 1920s when turnout plummeted way below 50% and the mandate of parliament began to lack credibility. The solution - compulsorary voting. Here all adult citizens must attend a polling place on polling day. This approach stems from seeing voting as a responsibility as well as a right. Australia is a democracy and as such its citizens have the responsibility of running the country through their representatives. One has no more right to not show up on polling day than to decide not to pay tax. Of course one can still abstain by voting informally but very few do. Because everyone votes, politicans need to appeal to everyone by taking everyone's position into account.
The issue of third parties is solved by preferential voting and/or proportional representation. These voting mechanisms ensure that the membership of parliament better reflects the propotions of voters - so losing votes to a small party is important. Even where there are single member electorates, one can make a statement by voting for a minor candidate whom one really supports and preference the lesser of the remaining evils so that one's vote will count for them after the minor candidate has been eliminated.
Further information is available at the Australian Electoral Commission's web site.
One commits a tort against a victim but a crime is commited against the state. It is for this reason that criminal cases are styled R. v Foo (or, I believe, "the people" in the US) rather than Victim v Foo.
The question of whether breach of copyright should be criminal, OTOH, is another matter...
* In some jurisdictions if your purchase of a domain name is deemed a consumer transaction (in Australia as a transaction under $A40,000 this would be ofr virtually everyone) then the choice of law clause may also be invalid and you may have the right to have the agreement considered under your local law.