So what exactly gives them the power to stop the service that I pay for because I may be using it for something illegal.
They own it. I'm pretty sure that they have no legal obligation to offer their services to everyone unconditionally.
Your recourse, of course, if their terms are unsatisfying to you, is to take your business elsewhere. This creates a system of checks and balances that keeps it from spiraling hopelessly out of control.
Well, they are talking about infringing torrent content only, so youtube, et al, would be entirely unaffected.
I think that the only potential problem that might arise is if you happened to be using bittorrent legtimately at the same time that somebody fingers your IP address as accessing infringing content via bittorrent.
Actually, the price point of the books made sense. Books cost money to print, and EB encyclopedias were not inexpensively bound either.
What did *NOT* make sense was that when they first started making a CDROM version of their encyclopedia, they priced it an only modestly below the printed version... and to be sure, a person who was inclined to spend that kind of capital could have just spent about an extra 20 or 30% and gotten the attractively bound books instead.
EB could have walked all over Encarta if they had charged, say, $100 or so for their CDROM. But they were simply too slow to realize just how the new technologies were shifting their industry.
I would agree with #1, but would amend #2 to be "any search of another person's personal property or possessions without a warrant is unconstitutional.
There are, after all, many types of searches that don't infringe on anybody's privacy or property rights.
For example, searching for your misplaced keys... using Google... trying to find a particular address or place..
Not that long ago, there was another slashdot article asking about people who had been sued by the RIAA... several responses admitted as much, but what I found intriguing was that *EVERY* person who said that they just ignored them when they get a letter, and did not try to respond in any way, did not ever have anything come of it beyond the initial threats.
I would think that an even better one is a fixed 40 years from the date of publication... and automatically falling into public domain if out of print for more a cumulative total of 10 years.
It encourages creators to continue creating, instead of sitting on their laurels and enjoying royalties of products that are decades old.
If they had made a case against this pub 20 years ago when they first started using the name, they'd have a much stronger trademark case. Trademarks have always been in the vein of "you snooze, you lose". If you don't defend your trademark religiously, you can end up losing it entirely.
... that I first saw the Encyclopedia Britannica on CD ROM at a newly set up retail kiosk in a nearby shopping mall. They were still actively advocating their bound book version back then, of course, and I would certainly have been interested in buying it, but for the price. The CD version looked intriguing, however... I thought that perhaps it would be more in line with what I could afford. Inquiring, the person I spoke to, who evidently worked directly for Encyclopedia Britannica, and was not simply employed as a kiosk sales agent in the mall, the price of the CD version was still upwards of a thousand dollars (I don't remember the exact price, but it was definitely 4 figures). For context, remember, this was in the first half of the 1990's.
I remember I politely told the fellow I was speaking with at the kiosk that the price they were asking for was simply unjustifiable, given the cost to reproduce a CD was on the order of pennies, and the price was going to have to come down by about factor of 10 or even more before people would really start taking the CD version seriously. I offered the reasoning that if a person was going to spend that kind of money, they might as well spend what was, relatively speaking, just a bit more and get the attractively bound books.
The guy at the kiosk told me quite flatly that would never happen... that they'd be more likely to simply stop selling the CD version.
I shook my head, suggesting he was wrong... and left.
When it comes to trademarks, it gets even worse for them. Trademarks must be actively defended, or else they are lost. As this pub has been going by that name for two decades, Saul Zaentz Company is almost 20 years too late to have a valid trademark complaint.
.... on mars will there ever be any significant corporate interest in going there.
From what we know so far, it's primarily just a gigantic rusted ball.
If it turns out that there are more precious materials further below the surface than the tiny rovers that we have sent so far have scraped off, or, even better, albeit probably much more of a stretch, if there are compounds that have never been discovered here on earth and exist naturally there which have sufficiently desirable properties, it might very well end up being worth their while to start sending manned expeditions there regularly..
It's less about likelihood and more about the fact that it simply *could* happen. Obviously, I prefer to be more prepared for genuinely likely eventualities, but even the unlikely ones, I prefer to have some contingency for that will have an absolute minimal cost to myself and those that I care for. I therefore prefer to keep the cost of my necessities as low as I can.
Ford will be releasing thirty thousand USB sticks to Ford owners...
This statement, taken literally, implies that each Ford owner will receive 30,000 USB sticks. Although common sense dictates that this is probably not what is meant, the statement is still grammatically ambiguous.
How it should probably read, while conveying the same important bits of information, is:
Ford will be releasing USB sticks to thirty thousand Ford owners
Although this does not state the exact number of sticks they are releasing, it does indicate the number of Ford owners that will receive them, which appeared (to me) to be the important bit of information in the (poorly worded) previous statement.
Not that I'm blaming Slashdot for this... those words were in the original article, anyways. But grammatically sentences like that kind of annoy the heck out of me.
Must be nice to be able to drop $150 or more on a new electronic appliance as easily as you would $6 on replacing a wallet plus the time spent going to the bank to get a replacement bank card. For myself, I prefer my necessities to be as inexpensive as possible.
While I realize that the general subject at hand is the issue with the RIAA, and keeping quiet about settlements with them, an ancestor to to my post said the following:
Happens all the time, especially in the medical field. You get a payout and are barred from saying anything to anyone.
It is such an issue that I was addressing... *THEY* are offering to pay *YOU* to keep quiet... I had confronted that post with the notion of just not accepting the payout, wondering what they would do... which, in turn, spawned this subthread.
Why would the judge be less likely to be impartial to me if I had refused to accept money to keep my mouth shut?
Bearing in mind that we're not really talking about being sued by the RIAA here anymore. An above poster brought up being offered a payoff in certain fields to keep quiet about some stuff.
It's less a matter of how likely it is than a matter of preferring to have contingencies in the event of unforeseen circumstances. For example, I have property insurance which covers everything in my apartment, and by extension everything I own, but the deductible on it is somewhat greater than the cost of my iPhone, so I would need to insure my iPhone separately to minimize the costs to myself if were as dependent on it for financial transactions as I am on my bank card. I would imagine, although I admit that I have not actually checked into this, that the costs of insuring a single piece of relatively small electronic equipment against loss or theft, without any deductible, is probably prohibitively expensive.
As for the time to call for each card... the net amount of time it should take one to do this is perhaps an hour, maybe two, at the most. Must be nice for you if you make an excess of $100 an hour. I don't. Not anywhere close.
And while yeah... you can get a smartphone on contract pretty inexpensively, this is only applicable if one is not already on such a contract. Otherwise, one still has to bear the full cost of the phone to replace it.
$200 is significantly more of an inconvenience than $6. And I've never paid any fees to replace lost or stolen credit cards.
Besides... when did I suggest that a person was any more liable to lose a phone than their wallet? I was actually considering the case where either is stolen. They might not be able to use your electronic wallet as easily as they might be able to use your credit cards from your physical wallet (but even that can turn out to be problematic for them if your CC's require pin entry, for example), but without a means of paying for things, you're still hooped until you replace it. Further, I've never been accountable for any fraudulent charges on my credit card on the occasions when I've had my physical card or simply my number stolen... and for what it's worth, I have no reason to think that my CC company is unusual (they are the most popular in the world, actually). Anyways, as it costs a whole lot less to replace a physical wallet, even with its myriad of contents, than it does to replace an iPhone, it simply seems more economically prudent to keep things that you vitally need in your physical wallet, instead of stored on your iPhone.
I was suggesting that one *NOT* take the payout.... and if they felt it was a worthy enough cause, to simply disclose the knowledge that they have.
I'm pretty sure that in American court systems, you cannot actually win a case against somebody who has simply embarrassed you by telling the truth without divulging any information they already received payment to not disclose (confidential information or stuff under NDA, for example), no matter how good your lawyers are. If you know of a specific precedent that indicates otherwise, share it.
Again, however... If they felt they had a case to sue you in the event that you disclosed it (after not accepting the payout), then why would they offer you a payout at all?
Slashdot Mirror
They own it. I'm pretty sure that they have no legal obligation to offer their services to everyone unconditionally.
Your recourse, of course, if their terms are unsatisfying to you, is to take your business elsewhere. This creates a system of checks and balances that keeps it from spiraling hopelessly out of control.
Well, they are talking about infringing torrent content only, so youtube, et al, would be entirely unaffected.
I think that the only potential problem that might arise is if you happened to be using bittorrent legtimately at the same time that somebody fingers your IP address as accessing infringing content via bittorrent.
Be an adult, and take responsibility for yourself.
Are you serious? Forget to take your meds today? Or do you need to cut down on the dosage?
That's some pretty radical bigotry you got going on there... you might want to talk to a shrink about it.
I'm serious. That's the same sort of mentality that causes genuinely serious atrocities to be committed. Get help, before you really hurt somebody.
What if you are willing to be?
Actually, the price point of the books made sense. Books cost money to print, and EB encyclopedias were not inexpensively bound either.
What did *NOT* make sense was that when they first started making a CDROM version of their encyclopedia, they priced it an only modestly below the printed version... and to be sure, a person who was inclined to spend that kind of capital could have just spent about an extra 20 or 30% and gotten the attractively bound books instead.
EB could have walked all over Encarta if they had charged, say, $100 or so for their CDROM. But they were simply too slow to realize just how the new technologies were shifting their industry.
I would agree with #1, but would amend #2 to be "any search of another person's personal property or possessions without a warrant is unconstitutional.
There are, after all, many types of searches that don't infringe on anybody's privacy or property rights.
For example, searching for your misplaced keys... using Google... trying to find a particular address or place..
Not that long ago, there was another slashdot article asking about people who had been sued by the RIAA... several responses admitted as much, but what I found intriguing was that *EVERY* person who said that they just ignored them when they get a letter, and did not try to respond in any way, did not ever have anything come of it beyond the initial threats.
The sun is just celebrating Pi day.
I think it's a wrong link.
Nonetheless, I found the mysterious dark circular object article far more interesting than the triangular sunspot one.
I would think that an even better one is a fixed 40 years from the date of publication... and automatically falling into public domain if out of print for more a cumulative total of 10 years.
It encourages creators to continue creating, instead of sitting on their laurels and enjoying royalties of products that are decades old.
If they had made a case against this pub 20 years ago when they first started using the name, they'd have a much stronger trademark case. Trademarks have always been in the vein of "you snooze, you lose". If you don't defend your trademark religiously, you can end up losing it entirely.
I remember I politely told the fellow I was speaking with at the kiosk that the price they were asking for was simply unjustifiable, given the cost to reproduce a CD was on the order of pennies, and the price was going to have to come down by about factor of 10 or even more before people would really start taking the CD version seriously. I offered the reasoning that if a person was going to spend that kind of money, they might as well spend what was, relatively speaking, just a bit more and get the attractively bound books.
The guy at the kiosk told me quite flatly that would never happen... that they'd be more likely to simply stop selling the CD version.
I shook my head, suggesting he was wrong... and left.
When it comes to trademarks, it gets even worse for them. Trademarks must be actively defended, or else they are lost. As this pub has been going by that name for two decades, Saul Zaentz Company is almost 20 years too late to have a valid trademark complaint.
From what we know so far, it's primarily just a gigantic rusted ball.
If it turns out that there are more precious materials further below the surface than the tiny rovers that we have sent so far have scraped off, or, even better, albeit probably much more of a stretch, if there are compounds that have never been discovered here on earth and exist naturally there which have sufficiently desirable properties, it might very well end up being worth their while to start sending manned expeditions there regularly..
It's less about likelihood and more about the fact that it simply *could* happen. Obviously, I prefer to be more prepared for genuinely likely eventualities, but even the unlikely ones, I prefer to have some contingency for that will have an absolute minimal cost to myself and those that I care for. I therefore prefer to keep the cost of my necessities as low as I can.
Touche.
FTA:
This statement, taken literally, implies that each Ford owner will receive 30,000 USB sticks. Although common sense dictates that this is probably not what is meant, the statement is still grammatically ambiguous.
How it should probably read, while conveying the same important bits of information, is:
Ford will be releasing USB sticks to thirty thousand Ford owners
Although this does not state the exact number of sticks they are releasing, it does indicate the number of Ford owners that will receive them, which appeared (to me) to be the important bit of information in the (poorly worded) previous statement.
Not that I'm blaming Slashdot for this... those words were in the original article, anyways. But grammatically sentences like that kind of annoy the heck out of me.
Must be nice to be able to drop $150 or more on a new electronic appliance as easily as you would $6 on replacing a wallet plus the time spent going to the bank to get a replacement bank card. For myself, I prefer my necessities to be as inexpensive as possible.
It is such an issue that I was addressing... *THEY* are offering to pay *YOU* to keep quiet... I had confronted that post with the notion of just not accepting the payout, wondering what they would do... which, in turn, spawned this subthread.
Why would the judge be less likely to be impartial to me if I had refused to accept money to keep my mouth shut?
Bearing in mind that we're not really talking about being sued by the RIAA here anymore. An above poster brought up being offered a payoff in certain fields to keep quiet about some stuff.
As for the time to call for each card... the net amount of time it should take one to do this is perhaps an hour, maybe two, at the most. Must be nice for you if you make an excess of $100 an hour. I don't. Not anywhere close.
And while yeah... you can get a smartphone on contract pretty inexpensively, this is only applicable if one is not already on such a contract. Otherwise, one still has to bear the full cost of the phone to replace it.
I structure my life around having contingencies.... and trying to keep the cost of those contingencies minimal.
If that makes me peculiar, then I guess I'm just peculiar.
$200 is significantly more of an inconvenience than $6. And I've never paid any fees to replace lost or stolen credit cards.
Besides... when did I suggest that a person was any more liable to lose a phone than their wallet? I was actually considering the case where either is stolen. They might not be able to use your electronic wallet as easily as they might be able to use your credit cards from your physical wallet (but even that can turn out to be problematic for them if your CC's require pin entry, for example), but without a means of paying for things, you're still hooped until you replace it. Further, I've never been accountable for any fraudulent charges on my credit card on the occasions when I've had my physical card or simply my number stolen... and for what it's worth, I have no reason to think that my CC company is unusual (they are the most popular in the world, actually). Anyways, as it costs a whole lot less to replace a physical wallet, even with its myriad of contents, than it does to replace an iPhone, it simply seems more economically prudent to keep things that you vitally need in your physical wallet, instead of stored on your iPhone.
Perhaps you misunderstand...
I was suggesting that one *NOT* take the payout.... and if they felt it was a worthy enough cause, to simply disclose the knowledge that they have.
I'm pretty sure that in American court systems, you cannot actually win a case against somebody who has simply embarrassed you by telling the truth without divulging any information they already received payment to not disclose (confidential information or stuff under NDA, for example), no matter how good your lawyers are. If you know of a specific precedent that indicates otherwise, share it.
Again, however... If they felt they had a case to sue you in the event that you disclosed it (after not accepting the payout), then why would they offer you a payout at all?