I would find it suspicious if an employee gave me his two-week notice, I offered to give him those two weeks off, and he wanted to keep coming in for work. I'm giving him a free vacation and he wants to stick around the office? That's the point where I would suspect him of wanting to do something nasty to me before he leaves.
While I agree that employment law is a complicated topic, and that people should ask real lawyers rather than come to Slashdot, the situation you describe isn't what's happening here. The post that inspired mine was talking about a requirement to give three months notice when you leave the company. There may be perfectly valid reasons that notice would be necessary. During that three-month period, the company certainly isn't depriving the individual of making a living.
But sure, generally speaking, I agree with you that all sorts of clauses in contracts could be held unenforceable. It just doesn't seem unreasonable in this specific situation, but again, it's not my opinion that matters here.
I'm surprised you'd offer that advice with no knowledge of the details of the case. On its face, this guy's story sounds unbelievable, but that's often because there's more to the story. It could be that they're "legally clueless", but we don't know that.
Not all paid time off is in the form of vacation. Where I work, we have vacation days (that they're obligated to compensate you for if you leave before you take them), and "personal days", which are just company-granted paid time off as you need to use them. You are not normally compensated for the latter if you fail to take them.
Why wouldn't it be legal? If you contract with your employer, and that's in your contract, it doesn't seem unreasonable if both sides agree to it. Of course, just because you have a contract doesn't necessarily mean you're REQUIRED to honor it. You have the right to breach a contract. Just pay attention to the penalties described the contract and the economic harm you might cause your employer by doing it (which they could come after you for).
It depends on the business and the individual. It's about managing costs (risks) and benefits. If the business can get by fine without the employee, you might be better off letting them go home after they give their notice. If you need to continue to use them for a few days, or a week, or the full two weeks, and it's worth the risks, then it's perfectly appropriate to do so.
Some large companies make it a policy to release people as soon as they give notice, maybe because large companies are less personal and are at a greater risk of having people leave on bad terms. Others may not. It depends on how you want to run your business. There are good reasons in either direction and a good manager balances those with the needs of the business.
Wow, an abrasive AC that didn't understand the parent post. I'm shocked.
He isn't saying that he's doing the equivalent of firing someone after they give their notice. He's letting the person go home and is paying them for the two weeks. This is very standard practice among companies and benefits BOTH sides. The employee isn't in the office POSSIBLY giving sub-standard work, affecting morale, or remaining a liability for their last two weeks of work. If the employee is evil, they're now deprived of the opportunity of causing problems.
Absolutely, two weeks notice is a courtesy. And employers appreciate that. But not all employers have a need to utilize the employee for those two weeks, and if you can get by without them, it is in your best interests to do so.
It's not necessarily about returning to work. Maybe you worked on a project there that, 5 years later, is experience someone is interested in hiring you for. They ask you for a reference. If you pissed off the guys you worked for when you earned that experience, you're not going to get a glowing reference.
Peers think you are a traitor for leaving them with the workload and having to train up someone new, and management resent you for leaving, prolly 'cos they never had the guts to.
This seems really weird to me. People leave jobs for all sorts of reasons. If someone leaving the company gets everyone else this upset, there has to be something else going on here. This is an unusual office dynamic that I don't think is very representative.
How can you tell if your BitTorrent is going slow due to your ISP having slower or fewer backbone connections than a competitor? This isn't a problem unique to the 'Net Neutrality debate, and it's inappropriate to try and "solve" it this way.
If you really want to be sure you have the best connection you'd need to do some empirical studies (or let some technology publication know that you'd be interested in subscribing or viewing their ads if they did one). This has the added benefit of working regardless of WHY your BitTorrent downloads are slower, be it slower connections or policy (throttling) decisions.
It's important to remember that back before we had this thing called "society", when people became sexually mature, they started having children. From a biological standpoint, this is how we were meant to work. The whole argument that it's evil and predatory is strictly a sociological thing invented by ourselves. Our society has grown so much more complex and complicated that it really is necessary to postpone adulthood just a little bit, because kids simply aren't ready yet to jump into adulthood when they hit puberty. But when people start saying that the desire to have sex with a teenager is the sign of a mental illness, that's only true in the sense that the person has not, for whatever reason, conformed to the social norm.
(I'm not trying to legitimize the behavior, because assault and murder are equally instinctive to us and we consider them wrong, but by the same token, it's not accurate to say that every murderer must be "sick" or have mental problems.)
In my own experience, treating "minors" as though they had a brain and could think intelligently usually leads to them doing so.
This is a good point and I agree. For the last few generations we seem to place so much importance on protecting our children that we are preventing them from growing up. This would seem to make protecting these children from harm all the more important, which just exacerbates the problem. You end up with useless, immature and irresponsible 20-year-olds that then need to rely on social programs. "Just do it for me!"
(Of course, I have no statistics to back this up, just my perceptions.)
Children are presumed to not understand the consequences of their actions. This is why they are never convicted of crimes, because the commission of a crime requires intent. If, on the other hand, you believe that the child did understand the consequences of his or her action, and was mature enough to understand that what they did was wrong and criminal, there's no reason they shouldn't be tried as an adult.
Children don't magically become adults just at the moment they turn 17 (or whatever it is in your state). This age is just the boundary for presuming their competency as an adult. This presumption can be challenged (in either direction).
If someone accidentally posted something under a CC license, or they did it on purpose and then realized that their work was being used in a way they didn't like, or they just didn't like the person using it, they could attempt to "undo" that license in the way suggested by the article summary and sue the person using their work, claiming no license was granted.
One of at least two things will happen:
1. The court believes the other person instead of you. Civil trials are not "proof beyond a reasonable doubt". It's whoever the court believes more. You lose your rights to use the work, lost a lot of time going to court over it, and have to pay substantially in lawyer's and possibly court fees.
2. Maybe you're able to prove that the work WAS licensed under a CC license at the time you got it. The court believes you. The other guy loses and you keep your rights to use the work. Good job. But you've lost a lot of time going to court over it, and have to pay substantially in lawyer's fees.
By not taking the extra time to more firmly establish your rights, you've put yourself in a situation that is almost certainly a net loss for you. By having that extra piece of paper, that extra documented communication with the original rights holder, you've added a significant deterrent to them attempting to sue you later, if for whatever reason they chose to try.
In addition, this makes the crucial assumption that the person purporting to license the work is actually authorized to do so. If the image actually belongs to someone else, and the Flickr account you found it under was some guy's account where he set his default license to a CC license, and reposted the image because he thought it was interesting, the CC license doesn't matter squat. The legal holder of the copyright did not license it under a CC license and you have no rights to use it. By not taking the extra time to figure this out, you never learned this and now you're in the wrong and SOL.
If you just want an image for your web page, that's one thing, but if you intend to use the work in some greater project that would suffer significant financial harm if it turns out there was no license, or the license you thought you had could be contested, it's irresponsible NOT to attempt to verify its legitimacy before you commit to using it.
You misunderstood the parent post. SHA-1 is a hash function. If you "encrypt" something using SHA-1, in theory, you can't "decrypt" it, because hash functions are irreversible. He's saying that if SHA-1 is "cracked" in the sense that you can easily figure out the original data, then you should be pleased, since you could not have "decrypted" the data otherwise.
While you can say that SHA-1 can be used as the basis for a cipher (such as Snuffle), that doesn't change the fact that SHA-1, by itself, is a hash function, not a cipher. SHA-1, by itself, is not an encryption algorithm. But Snuffle may very well be.
Each of those bullets starts with "Accompany it". The only requirement is that the source code or an offer to reasonably obtain it "accompany" the product that you are distributing. It's normally a lot easier to just stick it on a web site somewhere where anyone can download it, but this is not a requirement.
The recipient is still, of course, perfectly entitled to post that source code on a public web site.
Re:May not be intended to be a solution
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IsoHunt Shut Down?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If your case revolves around proving that you were harmed (as all civil cases do), then it does matter. What does it say when you have 10 people infringing your copyrights, and you single one of them out and claim that they're causing you irreparable harm, while the other 9 are doing the same thing? The harm must not be that severe, right? This will impact your ability to make your case and the ultimate compensation you receive.
May not be intended to be a solution
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IsoHunt Shut Down?
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· Score: 1, Interesting
If the **AA thinks that infringement is occurring, but they take no steps to try and shut down some of the infringement, it's easy to say, "If this was harming you so much, why didn't you try to stop them?" I don't think anyone is naive enough to think that these measures will permanently knock out a lot of these sites, but when it comes to proving your case, it's the effort that counts.
As far as criminal copyright charges do, downloading a fake file makes you as guilty as a real one.
While your post is generally accurate, I wanted to make sure people realized that there is no criminal offense you can be charged with for simply downloading a file like this that you had reason to suspect is being distributed improperly. Criminal copyright infringement isn't occurring here.
This leaves just the civil side, as you say. And without actual harm, there's no basis for a civil action. These people have done nothing wrong (no crime committed) and they haven't harmed anyone (no basis for a civil action).
Soliciting == doing, if the crime is for soliciting. The crime you're talking about isn't having sex with a prostitute, it's soliciting a prostitute for sex. The act of solicitation is what's illegal.
In addition, copyright infringement is not a crime, so rules of criminal procedure don't even apply.
these are things that the CEOs of the major telecoms are saying by themselves
I agree. But based on my own research, the CEOs are oversimplifying for the benefit of the media and are being misinterpreted by the technical audience reading that media.
The picture you paint is indeed scary and if I'm the one who's misinterpreted things, I will be firmly by your side in protest. This scenario just doesn't seem to make business sense to me, from the perspective of the ISPs/telecoms.
Not entirely true. If your router delays sending ACKs to packet senders (in other words not telling the sender that they have the packets OK) then the sender will slow down sending (or cease entirely until it gets more ACKs). It's one of the features of the TCP/IP beast. All your router needs to do is decide what to ACK and what to queue.
This would only apply to TCP-based data streams. While that might help mitigate congestion caused by BitTorrent, not all high-bandwidth applications use TCP. So while this is a good suggestion, it's only a partial solution.
You're right, but the issue isn't simply about people contracting for dedicated network connections. It's about IPTV. AT&T is in the process of deploying IPTV over its newer broadband connections. Since they own the network end-to-end, they can make architectural (multicast) and QoS decisions that allow them to reserve bandwidth for IPTV, guaranteeing that your TV show will remain on the air when your BitTorrent tries to monopolize your data connection.
But other people want to do IPTV too, and if AT&T has a high-bandwidth connection into everyone's homes, why shouldn't competitors be allowed to compete with them? A "neutral" Internet means AT&T should be required to treat its IPTV services equally with every other Internet service, which either means neutering AT&T's IPTV (you lose TV whenever you start BitTorrent) or giving away free dedicated network connections to its IPTV competitors (which you then pay for in the form of new fees on your broadband bill). The alternative is a "non-neutral" Internet where potential competitors pay for the new infrastructure they'll need to ensure guaranteed, QoS-managed data service to their customers (which you then pay for in the form of fees on your content provider's IPTV bill).
Faster data connections won't solve the problem. Unless you have infinite amount of bandwidth, there will always be use cases where your link will become congested. BitTorrent is a perfect example. Do a file transfer and you will generally always saturate your broadband connection with traffic. If you're simultaneously trying to watch HBO over your IPTV, those packets are now in direct competition with your BitTorrent download for your (now congested) Internet connection. This means your IPTV program will start to cut out.
QoS is needed to mitigate this problem. When your broadband connection (or any link over the data path) becomes congested, you need some way to tell the routers to give preference to your IPTV program over bulk BitTorrent data. This must necessarily be an end-to-end decision, because the backbone providers will not honor QoS. This means you need dedicated QoS-aware network connections between the content providers and your ISP, and these connections cost money.
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I would find it suspicious if an employee gave me his two-week notice, I offered to give him those two weeks off, and he wanted to keep coming in for work. I'm giving him a free vacation and he wants to stick around the office? That's the point where I would suspect him of wanting to do something nasty to me before he leaves.
While I agree that employment law is a complicated topic, and that people should ask real lawyers rather than come to Slashdot, the situation you describe isn't what's happening here. The post that inspired mine was talking about a requirement to give three months notice when you leave the company. There may be perfectly valid reasons that notice would be necessary. During that three-month period, the company certainly isn't depriving the individual of making a living.
But sure, generally speaking, I agree with you that all sorts of clauses in contracts could be held unenforceable. It just doesn't seem unreasonable in this specific situation, but again, it's not my opinion that matters here.
I'm surprised you'd offer that advice with no knowledge of the details of the case. On its face, this guy's story sounds unbelievable, but that's often because there's more to the story. It could be that they're "legally clueless", but we don't know that.
Not all paid time off is in the form of vacation. Where I work, we have vacation days (that they're obligated to compensate you for if you leave before you take them), and "personal days", which are just company-granted paid time off as you need to use them. You are not normally compensated for the latter if you fail to take them.
Why wouldn't it be legal? If you contract with your employer, and that's in your contract, it doesn't seem unreasonable if both sides agree to it. Of course, just because you have a contract doesn't necessarily mean you're REQUIRED to honor it. You have the right to breach a contract. Just pay attention to the penalties described the contract and the economic harm you might cause your employer by doing it (which they could come after you for).
It depends on the business and the individual. It's about managing costs (risks) and benefits. If the business can get by fine without the employee, you might be better off letting them go home after they give their notice. If you need to continue to use them for a few days, or a week, or the full two weeks, and it's worth the risks, then it's perfectly appropriate to do so.
Some large companies make it a policy to release people as soon as they give notice, maybe because large companies are less personal and are at a greater risk of having people leave on bad terms. Others may not. It depends on how you want to run your business. There are good reasons in either direction and a good manager balances those with the needs of the business.
Wow, an abrasive AC that didn't understand the parent post. I'm shocked.
He isn't saying that he's doing the equivalent of firing someone after they give their notice. He's letting the person go home and is paying them for the two weeks. This is very standard practice among companies and benefits BOTH sides. The employee isn't in the office POSSIBLY giving sub-standard work, affecting morale, or remaining a liability for their last two weeks of work. If the employee is evil, they're now deprived of the opportunity of causing problems.
Absolutely, two weeks notice is a courtesy. And employers appreciate that. But not all employers have a need to utilize the employee for those two weeks, and if you can get by without them, it is in your best interests to do so.
It's not necessarily about returning to work. Maybe you worked on a project there that, 5 years later, is experience someone is interested in hiring you for. They ask you for a reference. If you pissed off the guys you worked for when you earned that experience, you're not going to get a glowing reference.
How can you tell if your BitTorrent is going slow due to your ISP having slower or fewer backbone connections than a competitor? This isn't a problem unique to the 'Net Neutrality debate, and it's inappropriate to try and "solve" it this way.
If you really want to be sure you have the best connection you'd need to do some empirical studies (or let some technology publication know that you'd be interested in subscribing or viewing their ads if they did one). This has the added benefit of working regardless of WHY your BitTorrent downloads are slower, be it slower connections or policy (throttling) decisions.
Yeah, I think that's a reasonable view.
It's important to remember that back before we had this thing called "society", when people became sexually mature, they started having children. From a biological standpoint, this is how we were meant to work. The whole argument that it's evil and predatory is strictly a sociological thing invented by ourselves. Our society has grown so much more complex and complicated that it really is necessary to postpone adulthood just a little bit, because kids simply aren't ready yet to jump into adulthood when they hit puberty. But when people start saying that the desire to have sex with a teenager is the sign of a mental illness, that's only true in the sense that the person has not, for whatever reason, conformed to the social norm.
(I'm not trying to legitimize the behavior, because assault and murder are equally instinctive to us and we consider them wrong, but by the same token, it's not accurate to say that every murderer must be "sick" or have mental problems.)
My two cents, at least.
(Of course, I have no statistics to back this up, just my perceptions.)
Children are presumed to not understand the consequences of their actions. This is why they are never convicted of crimes, because the commission of a crime requires intent. If, on the other hand, you believe that the child did understand the consequences of his or her action, and was mature enough to understand that what they did was wrong and criminal, there's no reason they shouldn't be tried as an adult.
Children don't magically become adults just at the moment they turn 17 (or whatever it is in your state). This age is just the boundary for presuming their competency as an adult. This presumption can be challenged (in either direction).
If someone accidentally posted something under a CC license, or they did it on purpose and then realized that their work was being used in a way they didn't like, or they just didn't like the person using it, they could attempt to "undo" that license in the way suggested by the article summary and sue the person using their work, claiming no license was granted.
One of at least two things will happen:
1. The court believes the other person instead of you. Civil trials are not "proof beyond a reasonable doubt". It's whoever the court believes more. You lose your rights to use the work, lost a lot of time going to court over it, and have to pay substantially in lawyer's and possibly court fees.
2. Maybe you're able to prove that the work WAS licensed under a CC license at the time you got it. The court believes you. The other guy loses and you keep your rights to use the work. Good job. But you've lost a lot of time going to court over it, and have to pay substantially in lawyer's fees.
By not taking the extra time to more firmly establish your rights, you've put yourself in a situation that is almost certainly a net loss for you. By having that extra piece of paper, that extra documented communication with the original rights holder, you've added a significant deterrent to them attempting to sue you later, if for whatever reason they chose to try.
In addition, this makes the crucial assumption that the person purporting to license the work is actually authorized to do so. If the image actually belongs to someone else, and the Flickr account you found it under was some guy's account where he set his default license to a CC license, and reposted the image because he thought it was interesting, the CC license doesn't matter squat. The legal holder of the copyright did not license it under a CC license and you have no rights to use it. By not taking the extra time to figure this out, you never learned this and now you're in the wrong and SOL.
If you just want an image for your web page, that's one thing, but if you intend to use the work in some greater project that would suffer significant financial harm if it turns out there was no license, or the license you thought you had could be contested, it's irresponsible NOT to attempt to verify its legitimacy before you commit to using it.
You misunderstood the parent post. SHA-1 is a hash function. If you "encrypt" something using SHA-1, in theory, you can't "decrypt" it, because hash functions are irreversible. He's saying that if SHA-1 is "cracked" in the sense that you can easily figure out the original data, then you should be pleased, since you could not have "decrypted" the data otherwise.
While you can say that SHA-1 can be used as the basis for a cipher (such as Snuffle), that doesn't change the fact that SHA-1, by itself, is a hash function, not a cipher. SHA-1, by itself, is not an encryption algorithm. But Snuffle may very well be.
Each of those bullets starts with "Accompany it". The only requirement is that the source code or an offer to reasonably obtain it "accompany" the product that you are distributing. It's normally a lot easier to just stick it on a web site somewhere where anyone can download it, but this is not a requirement.
The recipient is still, of course, perfectly entitled to post that source code on a public web site.
If your case revolves around proving that you were harmed (as all civil cases do), then it does matter. What does it say when you have 10 people infringing your copyrights, and you single one of them out and claim that they're causing you irreparable harm, while the other 9 are doing the same thing? The harm must not be that severe, right? This will impact your ability to make your case and the ultimate compensation you receive.
If the **AA thinks that infringement is occurring, but they take no steps to try and shut down some of the infringement, it's easy to say, "If this was harming you so much, why didn't you try to stop them?" I don't think anyone is naive enough to think that these measures will permanently knock out a lot of these sites, but when it comes to proving your case, it's the effort that counts.
As far as criminal copyright charges do, downloading a fake file makes you as guilty as a real one.
While your post is generally accurate, I wanted to make sure people realized that there is no criminal offense you can be charged with for simply downloading a file like this that you had reason to suspect is being distributed improperly. Criminal copyright infringement isn't occurring here.
This leaves just the civil side, as you say. And without actual harm, there's no basis for a civil action. These people have done nothing wrong (no crime committed) and they haven't harmed anyone (no basis for a civil action).
Soliciting == doing, if the crime is for soliciting. The crime you're talking about isn't having sex with a prostitute, it's soliciting a prostitute for sex. The act of solicitation is what's illegal.
In addition, copyright infringement is not a crime, so rules of criminal procedure don't even apply.
I agree. But based on my own research, the CEOs are oversimplifying for the benefit of the media and are being misinterpreted by the technical audience reading that media.
The picture you paint is indeed scary and if I'm the one who's misinterpreted things, I will be firmly by your side in protest. This scenario just doesn't seem to make business sense to me, from the perspective of the ISPs/telecoms.
This would only apply to TCP-based data streams. While that might help mitigate congestion caused by BitTorrent, not all high-bandwidth applications use TCP. So while this is a good suggestion, it's only a partial solution.
You're right, but the issue isn't simply about people contracting for dedicated network connections. It's about IPTV. AT&T is in the process of deploying IPTV over its newer broadband connections. Since they own the network end-to-end, they can make architectural (multicast) and QoS decisions that allow them to reserve bandwidth for IPTV, guaranteeing that your TV show will remain on the air when your BitTorrent tries to monopolize your data connection.
But other people want to do IPTV too, and if AT&T has a high-bandwidth connection into everyone's homes, why shouldn't competitors be allowed to compete with them? A "neutral" Internet means AT&T should be required to treat its IPTV services equally with every other Internet service, which either means neutering AT&T's IPTV (you lose TV whenever you start BitTorrent) or giving away free dedicated network connections to its IPTV competitors (which you then pay for in the form of new fees on your broadband bill). The alternative is a "non-neutral" Internet where potential competitors pay for the new infrastructure they'll need to ensure guaranteed, QoS-managed data service to their customers (which you then pay for in the form of fees on your content provider's IPTV bill).
At least that's how I understand it.
Faster data connections won't solve the problem. Unless you have infinite amount of bandwidth, there will always be use cases where your link will become congested. BitTorrent is a perfect example. Do a file transfer and you will generally always saturate your broadband connection with traffic. If you're simultaneously trying to watch HBO over your IPTV, those packets are now in direct competition with your BitTorrent download for your (now congested) Internet connection. This means your IPTV program will start to cut out.
QoS is needed to mitigate this problem. When your broadband connection (or any link over the data path) becomes congested, you need some way to tell the routers to give preference to your IPTV program over bulk BitTorrent data. This must necessarily be an end-to-end decision, because the backbone providers will not honor QoS. This means you need dedicated QoS-aware network connections between the content providers and your ISP, and these connections cost money.