Then obviously you have no idea what the term "common law" means in which case you're simply not qualified to be making any statement whatsoever about the law
If you can present case law that supports your position I'll concede I'm wrong.
I'm not going to waste my time on seeking out specific Californian case law for such a basic principle of law dating back a thousand years. I suggest you start by looking at what the Restatement of Torts has to say about it (as poor quality a work as that is it will be better than your ignorance), but since you obviously haven't the slightest shred of a whisper of a clue as to what the common law is I'm sure you won't understand the Restatement. Alternatively you might like to look at some of my other posts to this story, some of which describe in summary the true legal rules applicable to the example you gave.
It's bad enough that non-lawyers like to give legal advice on slashdot, it's ridiculous when they start getting uppity about it.
IAAL and I'm getting more than a little fed up with ignorant people who can't even recognise their own ignorance.
Hardly. In case you haven't figured it out yet, IAAL. You on the other hand forgot your IANAL disclaimer, which is obvious from your post which could not possibly be more wrong if you tried.
My understanding is that trespassing is covered by the criminal code (a misdemeanor almost everywhere, usually covered by a fine).
While trespass has been made a crime in some circumstances in many jurisdictions, this is separate to, does not diminish, and subject to potentially different rules to, civil trespass. Lawyers typically refer to it as "criminal trespass" and use "trespass" alone to refer to civil trespass.
So called "civil trespass" would simply be suing someone one in civil court for something you refer to as trespassing.
There is no civil action for the crimes of others - a civil action must be founded on a civil wrong. The same action may constitute both a civil wrong and a crime, but the civil wrong and its rules are entirely separate from and usually unrelated to the crime. Trespass has been a civil tort since the common law started about a thousand years ago. Some sloppy (or disturbingly ignorant) lawyers like to use the word "tort" when they mean "negligence", but the trespass torts are actually far more important since they form the basis for the entire system of property law in common law jurisdictions.
You can sue someone for absolutely anything you want, you just aren't likely to win in many cases.
You can initiate an action for anything you want, but you (or your lawyer) may breach the law if the complaint if frivolous, vexatious or an abuse of process (a formulation that means the action is not based on any legitimate theory as to the law) and such an action will be dismissed summarily on the application of the defendant.
If someone were to trespass you could sue them and might even get damages if the courts thought they were appropriate.
If you sue somebody for trespass (the tort, civil trespass) and the court is satisfied that they have actually committed a trespass (to land), you will most certainly get damages, although they may be so small it's not worth suing. You can also bring an action for an injunction against further trespass.
That said, trying to refer to a "crime" as "civil-foo" is confusing and misleading.
Giving long diatribes with an air of authority on something you clearly know nothing about without (or even with) an appropriate disclaimer is what is misleading.
Trespassing is not automatic. Crossing an imaginary property line is not trespassing, even if prominent "No Trespassing" or "No Soliciting" signs are posted.
Argh! Wrong, wrong, and wrong. As soon as you cross into private property without consent you commit civil trespass at common law. It doesn't matter whether there are signs or not, or even whether there are fences or not. In some circumstances there is implied consent, but you need to establish grounds for implied consent and establish that your conduct fell within the bounds of that implied consent.
Pennsylvania state law will not consider entering and turning around in a driveway trespassing unless the driveway is marked as private or is gated or otherwise enclosed in a manner that is designed to secure it from intruders. See http://members.aol.com/StatutesPA/18.Cp.35.html. So there was no criminal or civil offense committed.
That is a criminal law statute. It has nothing whatsoever to do with civil trespass, and you are unlikely to find a convenient statutory description of the rules of civil trespass since they are derived from statements made by courts - that is, they are case law, and the rules are too complex for a convenient 5 line description.
Actually, this varies a lot by jurisdiction. For example, in both my state and in Pittsburgh where the event took place, it is only illegal to be on private property if their are posted "no trespassing" signs or if they are asked to leave and refuse (or are asked to leave and return).
I strongly suspect you are confusing criminal trespass and civil trespass here. They are different things and may well have different rules, although something amounting to criminal trespass will almost always also be civil trespass.
1: it is assumed that a driveway can be reasonably used at will to turn a vehicle around.
There is implied consent at common law to using a driveway to turn a vehicle around, provided you don't go any further than necessary to do so.
2: tresspassing is not automatic. In most states even when properly posted, you can still go onto private land and go up to the front door.
True. This is a matter of implied consent too.
Even salesman can ring bells at homes posted no soliciting in SC.
This is strange and certainly out of synch with the common law rules elsewhere since the implied consent has been revoked. If you had said Louisiana I might have less inclination to query this. Do you have a citation, or, even better, a link?
3: the proerty itself was not marked, posted, fenced with a gate, not in any other way abvious that is was private.
Not relevant to trespass - mistake is not a defence in the law of trespass.
4: all they had to do was ask for the images to be removed.
(a) Not relevant to questions of trespass; (b) presumes the victim is on the net, aware of Google images, aware of street view, aware the particular images are there, and is aware of right to ask for removal.
5:the engineer in the vehicle has no control over the images being taken, not can he catalog or document them. This is ON PURPOSE to prevent tampering with the image feeds, and to keep the image recorder in sync with GPS information.
That's not an excuse for breaching privacy - it is trivial to design systems where the error could be flagged so as to avoid this, and even if it weren't that wouldn't be an excuse for trespass.
All of your examples rely on implied consent (which is a defence) or mistake (which is not), or something that would not even be give the slightest value in a court of law. For the examples that rely on implied consent, the only ones where there is actually a defence to trespass here, the problem you have is that implied consent depends on the purpose of entry and only goes as far as that purpose. Implied consent to enter for the purpose of turning a vehicle around does not extend to taking photos on the property, nor does implied consent to enter to knock on the door extend to taking photos. This is quite clearly trespass in most common law jurisdictions. I only say "most" because the 50 (49 state and 1 for territories) common law jurisdictions in the US result in some very odd twists to common law in some of the states, and of course a statute could have abrogated the common law in some place (but beware the implied right to privacy that might trump such abrogations).
Just because a road is on the maps, does not make it a public road.
But it should give legal protection to people who go by the official government documents until they have been corrected.
It doesn't. In the intentional torts, the actions of the trespasser would be described as "mistake" - that is, they were mistaken as to title to the road. Mistake is not a defence for trespass, and it doesn't matter what the source of the mistake is (almost - if the mistake was induced by the plaintiff there might be an estoppel).
So, you are saying 1.000.000 knowledgeable geeks would be working to fix the driver ?
Not the Windows driver, but perhaps the Linux one. Of course geeks using Linux are less tolerant of bugs that render the system unusable, so while the Nvidia drivers used to be the source of 100% bugs that could only be recovered through a hard reboot under Linux on my desktop, Nvidia saw the light and improved quality so my desktop hasn't had such a problem in well over a year now.
No, you've got it backwards. The law prioritizes preserving the public domain status of noncopyrightable elements over whatever else might be copyrightable;....
No, the law protects the substance of the original expression in the work. The layout is part of the substantial expression. This is not like a telephone book case where there has merely been a methodical collection of information from the public domain. All of the expression in the layout originated with the prospective plaintiffs. It is part of the substance of the expression in the image.
I don't think this is true [that the arrangement of squares is protected by copyright] You could patent the arrangement, but that would have expired by now.
While the arrangement of squares is not strictly protected by copyright in itself, the entire image of the game board is protected by copyright as an image. That protection extends to derivative works. Any board that used the same layout would be a derivative work infringing on that image. So while it is technically true to say the arrangement of squares is not protected, the net effect of the law is you cannot use the same arrangement without infringing copyright.
And besides....it's only the money. We're all guns for hire.
Not all of us - that's where ethics comes in. A person absent ethics is a gun for hire without conditions. A person with ethics seeks to make sure everything they do has a positive (or at least no negative) impact on the world.
Patents themselves aren't inheritly evil.
Sorry, but a system that penalises people who come up with the idea innocently, on their own and without any knowledge of (or derived from) the patent most certainly is inherently evil.
the superstars are the laid-back and chilled out programmers, while the arrogant programmers are the wannabes - if they really knew as much as they thought they did, they wouldn't be so insecure.
True to an extent. An arrogant programmer may well become a superstar some day, but to get all the way they need to lose the arrogance. A superstar is going to be somebody who has learnt enough to know that he doesn't know everything and that new ideas of merit can come from surprising sources. If they don't, they stop learning. A superstar doesn't have to go around putting down people as incompetent - a proto-superstar might still be doing so, but must outgrow it before they become a real superstar.
Why not just hang outside the doors of Google, and try to catch the 'superstars' either already working there, or on their way in to interview for a job there.
Depends on the type of superstar you're after. Google has lost a lot of it appeal so the more ethically constrained superstars by reason of being evil, such as by their now very aggressive pursuit of patents (not the only problem). In one degree it's worse than Microsoft - it's one thing to be evil, it's entirely another to be evil when your organisation is founded on the idea that you shouldn't be evil. I would now regard employment with Google to be selling my soul just as much as (and perhaps more than) employment with Microsoft.
it is based upon patents originally owned by AT&T which had agreed to license the patents to all for Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms
If so then it is likely the troll will be held to those terms in a court - provided they had notice of the license prior to purchasing from AT&T.
Furthermore, people in higher income brackets get targetted more by advertisers and panhandlers, and as a result of the higher exposure to marketing are far less likely to be influenced by it.
the idea of patents is to prevent "parasitic maggots" that capitalize, copy, and lazily "innovate" using someone else's effort
That has precisely nothing to do with the role of patents. If that were the idea behind patents, then independent invention would be an absolute defence. The fact is that once there is a patent it doesn't matter if a million other people independently invent the thing, they are all subject to the burden of the patent.
Patents are, in theory, about promoting the useful arts. The idea is that patents provide incentive to people to produce new techniques so that they are produced much earlier than they otherwise would have been. In principle "much earlier" should have some favourable correlation to the lifetime of a patent.
Unfortunately, this is frequently not what patents do.
Technological development is like a wave breaking towards a beach. There's a whole front of development involving a whole lot of people. The vast majority of the time, the next development is inevitable, and many, many people will cross a particular piece of ground as part of the unstoppable march towards the final goal. Patents encourage those crossing this common ground to stake a claim that amounts to a trap against those crossing this same ground as they inevitably will. More knowledgable participants recognise what is happening, and more ethical participants recognise that even though the law might allow them to stake a claim to the area that everybody is being driven towards, it is wrong to do so just because you happen to stake the claim before anybody else does.
True breakthroughs, before-time development of future technologies, are extraordinarily rare - the sheer number of patents in existence is more than sufficient evidence that there is something wrong with the system and that the pool of truly legitimate patents is a mere drop in the ocean of patents in existence.
There is no doubt in my mind on this point. Patents do more damage than good. We should be fostering a free market for new technologies, not imposing artificial monopolies that stifle technological progress.
What I don't want is my phone to attempt to be a PDA. A phone's screen is not big enough to handle the amount of information I want on the screen (and me able to see it clearly.)
This is a personal bugbear for me too. I'm currently in the market for a PDA. Not a phone/PDA combo - I want to be able to use the PDA while the phone's busy with something else, like allowing me to listen to somebody at the other end of the phone without being on speaker so the quality suffers. The usual suspects are no longer stocking standard PDAs at all.
Nah, you just have to have the right environment. Based on years of intensive research into the matter and the work of the major scholars in this area - Maury Povich and Jerry Springer - the right environment is a trailer park.
the guage controlling unit [aka fuel level ending unit or fuel sending unit] is inside the tank, wires and all... The wires for your electric fuel pump are inside the tank too.
That was my reaction too - rather sensationalist summary given that there are two sets of live electric wires in almost every modern automobile. Yes, people, if you're in the back seat of a typical passenger car you're sitting right on top of 60 litres of fuel with two sets of wires carrying live current.
I don't see how you can say human evolution is only occurring 100 times faster than ever. My own observations suggest people are getting dumber by the minute, which I take as adaptation to excessive reliance on technology to do peoples' thinking for them and on stickers attached to every object under the Californian Sun saying "This... may cause injury or death."
I believe that the code an author publishes on an open forum is copyrighted by the author by default.
The classic lawyer answer really applies here: it depends. A license does not have to be given explicitly - it can be implied from all the circumstances in which the code was published. Lawyers would prefer to have things explicit, but that does not mean the implicit license is any worse than an explicit one. The difficulty really is that there is some higher degree of risk in implying a license, and if you get it wrong you can get sued.
Quite often code posted to a forum will be posted in a context where a license can be implied, provided the code originated with the person doing the posting.
Always remember that "license" is lawyer-speak for "permission" - and referred to in that way it makes it much easier for a non-lawyer to understand licensing issues. For example, going onto somebody else's land without a license (permission) is illegal, however you can infer an implied license from circumstances: A path leading up to a front door gives rise to an implied license to go and ring the doorbell to make contact with the resident, and an open shop door gives rise to an implied license to enter the shop. These licenses arise because the circumstances make it clear that this is what the occupier intended.
The same broad principles apply to software licenses.
Slashdot Mirror
Then obviously you have no idea what the term "common law" means in which case you're simply not qualified to be making any statement whatsoever about the law
I'm not going to waste my time on seeking out specific Californian case law for such a basic principle of law dating back a thousand years. I suggest you start by looking at what the Restatement of Torts has to say about it (as poor quality a work as that is it will be better than your ignorance), but since you obviously haven't the slightest shred of a whisper of a clue as to what the common law is I'm sure you won't understand the Restatement. Alternatively you might like to look at some of my other posts to this story, some of which describe in summary the true legal rules applicable to the example you gave.
It's bad enough that non-lawyers like to give legal advice on slashdot, it's ridiculous when they start getting uppity about it.
IAAL and I'm getting more than a little fed up with ignorant people who can't even recognise their own ignorance.
Hardly. In case you haven't figured it out yet, IAAL. You on the other hand forgot your IANAL disclaimer, which is obvious from your post which could not possibly be more wrong if you tried.
While trespass has been made a crime in some circumstances in many jurisdictions, this is separate to, does not diminish, and subject to potentially different rules to, civil trespass. Lawyers typically refer to it as "criminal trespass" and use "trespass" alone to refer to civil trespass.
There is no civil action for the crimes of others - a civil action must be founded on a civil wrong. The same action may constitute both a civil wrong and a crime, but the civil wrong and its rules are entirely separate from and usually unrelated to the crime. Trespass has been a civil tort since the common law started about a thousand years ago. Some sloppy (or disturbingly ignorant) lawyers like to use the word "tort" when they mean "negligence", but the trespass torts are actually far more important since they form the basis for the entire system of property law in common law jurisdictions.
You can initiate an action for anything you want, but you (or your lawyer) may breach the law if the complaint if frivolous, vexatious or an abuse of process (a formulation that means the action is not based on any legitimate theory as to the law) and such an action will be dismissed summarily on the application of the defendant.
If you sue somebody for trespass (the tort, civil trespass) and the court is satisfied that they have actually committed a trespass (to land), you will most certainly get damages, although they may be so small it's not worth suing. You can also bring an action for an injunction against further trespass.
Giving long diatribes with an air of authority on something you clearly know nothing about without (or even with) an appropriate disclaimer is what is misleading.
Argh! Wrong, wrong, and wrong. As soon as you cross into private property without consent you commit civil trespass at common law. It doesn't matter whether there are signs or not, or even whether there are fences or not. In some circumstances there is implied consent, but you need to establish grounds for implied consent and establish that your conduct fell within the bounds of that implied consent.
That is a criminal law statute. It has nothing whatsoever to do with civil trespass, and you are unlikely to find a convenient statutory description of the rules of civil trespass since they are derived from statements made by courts - that is, they are case law, and the rules are too complex for a convenient 5 line description.
I strongly suspect you are confusing criminal trespass and civil trespass here. They are different things and may well have different rules, although something amounting to criminal trespass will almost always also be civil trespass.
There is implied consent at common law to using a driveway to turn a vehicle around, provided you don't go any further than necessary to do so.
True. This is a matter of implied consent too.
This is strange and certainly out of synch with the common law rules elsewhere since the implied consent has been revoked. If you had said Louisiana I might have less inclination to query this. Do you have a citation, or, even better, a link?
Not relevant to trespass - mistake is not a defence in the law of trespass.
(a) Not relevant to questions of trespass; (b) presumes the victim is on the net, aware of Google images, aware of street view, aware the particular images are there, and is aware of right to ask for removal.
That's not an excuse for breaching privacy - it is trivial to design systems where the error could be flagged so as to avoid this, and even if it weren't that wouldn't be an excuse for trespass.
All of your examples rely on implied consent (which is a defence) or mistake (which is not), or something that would not even be give the slightest value in a court of law. For the examples that rely on implied consent, the only ones where there is actually a defence to trespass here, the problem you have is that implied consent depends on the purpose of entry and only goes as far as that purpose. Implied consent to enter for the purpose of turning a vehicle around does not extend to taking photos on the property, nor does implied consent to enter to knock on the door extend to taking photos. This is quite clearly trespass in most common law jurisdictions. I only say "most" because the 50 (49 state and 1 for territories) common law jurisdictions in the US result in some very odd twists to common law in some of the states, and of course a statute could have abrogated the common law in some place (but beware the implied right to privacy that might trump such abrogations).
It doesn't. In the intentional torts, the actions of the trespasser would be described as "mistake" - that is, they were mistaken as to title to the road. Mistake is not a defence for trespass, and it doesn't matter what the source of the mistake is (almost - if the mistake was induced by the plaintiff there might be an estoppel).
So, you are saying 1.000.000 knowledgeable geeks would be working to fix the driver ?
Not the Windows driver, but perhaps the Linux one. Of course geeks using Linux are less tolerant of bugs that render the system unusable, so while the Nvidia drivers used to be the source of 100% bugs that could only be recovered through a hard reboot under Linux on my desktop, Nvidia saw the light and improved quality so my desktop hasn't had such a problem in well over a year now.
No, you've got it backwards. The law prioritizes preserving the public domain status of noncopyrightable elements over whatever else might be copyrightable;....
No, the law protects the substance of the original expression in the work. The layout is part of the substantial expression. This is not like a telephone book case where there has merely been a methodical collection of information from the public domain. All of the expression in the layout originated with the prospective plaintiffs. It is part of the substance of the expression in the image.
I am a lawyer too.
.I don't think this is true [that the arrangement of squares is protected by copyright] You could patent the arrangement, but that would have expired by now.
While the arrangement of squares is not strictly protected by copyright in itself, the entire image of the game board is protected by copyright as an image. That protection extends to derivative works. Any board that used the same layout would be a derivative work infringing on that image. So while it is technically true to say the arrangement of squares is not protected, the net effect of the law is you cannot use the same arrangement without infringing copyright.
Funny that all three posts say exactly the same thing... You guys must've posted at exactly the same time!
Only from your frame of reference.
Software is the new Hardware
We're not interested in your erectile dysfunction pills.
Yes.
I came up with different answers: hell yes; duuuh; no, it's way past time.
And besides....it's only the money. We're all guns for hire.
Not all of us - that's where ethics comes in. A person absent ethics is a gun for hire without conditions. A person with ethics seeks to make sure everything they do has a positive (or at least no negative) impact on the world.
Patents themselves aren't inheritly evil.
Sorry, but a system that penalises people who come up with the idea innocently, on their own and without any knowledge of (or derived from) the patent most certainly is inherently evil.
the superstars are the laid-back and chilled out programmers, while the arrogant programmers are the wannabes - if they really knew as much as they thought they did, they wouldn't be so insecure.
True to an extent. An arrogant programmer may well become a superstar some day, but to get all the way they need to lose the arrogance. A superstar is going to be somebody who has learnt enough to know that he doesn't know everything and that new ideas of merit can come from surprising sources. If they don't, they stop learning. A superstar doesn't have to go around putting down people as incompetent - a proto-superstar might still be doing so, but must outgrow it before they become a real superstar.
Why not just hang outside the doors of Google, and try to catch the 'superstars' either already working there, or on their way in to interview for a job there.
Depends on the type of superstar you're after. Google has lost a lot of it appeal so the more ethically constrained superstars by reason of being evil, such as by their now very aggressive pursuit of patents (not the only problem). In one degree it's worse than Microsoft - it's one thing to be evil, it's entirely another to be evil when your organisation is founded on the idea that you shouldn't be evil. I would now regard employment with Google to be selling my soul just as much as (and perhaps more than) employment with Microsoft.
it is based upon patents originally owned by AT&T which had agreed to license the patents to all for Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms
If so then it is likely the troll will be held to those terms in a court - provided they had notice of the license prior to purchasing from AT&T.
Furthermore, people in higher income brackets get targetted more by advertisers and panhandlers, and as a result of the higher exposure to marketing are far less likely to be influenced by it.
the idea of patents is to prevent "parasitic maggots" that capitalize, copy, and lazily "innovate" using someone else's effort
That has precisely nothing to do with the role of patents. If that were the idea behind patents, then independent invention would be an absolute defence. The fact is that once there is a patent it doesn't matter if a million other people independently invent the thing, they are all subject to the burden of the patent.
Patents are, in theory, about promoting the useful arts. The idea is that patents provide incentive to people to produce new techniques so that they are produced much earlier than they otherwise would have been. In principle "much earlier" should have some favourable correlation to the lifetime of a patent.
Unfortunately, this is frequently not what patents do.
Technological development is like a wave breaking towards a beach. There's a whole front of development involving a whole lot of people. The vast majority of the time, the next development is inevitable, and many, many people will cross a particular piece of ground as part of the unstoppable march towards the final goal. Patents encourage those crossing this common ground to stake a claim that amounts to a trap against those crossing this same ground as they inevitably will. More knowledgable participants recognise what is happening, and more ethical participants recognise that even though the law might allow them to stake a claim to the area that everybody is being driven towards, it is wrong to do so just because you happen to stake the claim before anybody else does.
True breakthroughs, before-time development of future technologies, are extraordinarily rare - the sheer number of patents in existence is more than sufficient evidence that there is something wrong with the system and that the pool of truly legitimate patents is a mere drop in the ocean of patents in existence.
There is no doubt in my mind on this point. Patents do more damage than good. We should be fostering a free market for new technologies, not imposing artificial monopolies that stifle technological progress.
All hail the computer
What I don't want is my phone to attempt to be a PDA. A phone's screen is not big enough to handle the amount of information I want on the screen (and me able to see it clearly.)
This is a personal bugbear for me too. I'm currently in the market for a PDA. Not a phone/PDA combo - I want to be able to use the PDA while the phone's busy with something else, like allowing me to listen to somebody at the other end of the phone without being on speaker so the quality suffers. The usual suspects are no longer stocking standard PDAs at all.
Pregnancy is surprisingly difficult.
Nah, you just have to have the right environment. Based on years of intensive research into the matter and the work of the major scholars in this area - Maury Povich and Jerry Springer - the right environment is a trailer park.
the guage controlling unit [aka fuel level ending unit or fuel sending unit] is inside the tank, wires and all... The wires for your electric fuel pump are inside the tank too.
That was my reaction too - rather sensationalist summary given that there are two sets of live electric wires in almost every modern automobile. Yes, people, if you're in the back seat of a typical passenger car you're sitting right on top of 60 litres of fuel with two sets of wires carrying live current.
I don't see how you can say human evolution is only occurring 100 times faster than ever. My own observations suggest people are getting dumber by the minute, which I take as adaptation to excessive reliance on technology to do peoples' thinking for them and on stickers attached to every object under the Californian Sun saying "This ... may cause injury or death."
I believe that the code an author publishes on an open forum is copyrighted by the author by default.
The classic lawyer answer really applies here: it depends. A license does not have to be given explicitly - it can be implied from all the circumstances in which the code was published. Lawyers would prefer to have things explicit, but that does not mean the implicit license is any worse than an explicit one. The difficulty really is that there is some higher degree of risk in implying a license, and if you get it wrong you can get sued.
Quite often code posted to a forum will be posted in a context where a license can be implied, provided the code originated with the person doing the posting.
Always remember that "license" is lawyer-speak for "permission" - and referred to in that way it makes it much easier for a non-lawyer to understand licensing issues. For example, going onto somebody else's land without a license (permission) is illegal, however you can infer an implied license from circumstances: A path leading up to a front door gives rise to an implied license to go and ring the doorbell to make contact with the resident, and an open shop door gives rise to an implied license to enter the shop. These licenses arise because the circumstances make it clear that this is what the occupier intended.
The same broad principles apply to software licenses.