With electricity, water and such, you control how much you use. You can reduce your usage if you can't afford the higher bills.
On the Web, the web site controls how much I use. If they include an ad on their site that streams video, I can't stop them from doing it short of not visiting that site at all. And of course I don't know what they'll do until after I'm already on the site and the usage has occurred, so how exactly do I control my usage? Also, in too many cases the caps don't take into account normal or ordinary usage, they're set solely to let the ISP avoid investing in better infrastructure. Too often the caps aren't about backbone bandwidth, they're imposed because of local congestion within the ISP's own infrastructure where bandwidth isn't costing the ISP anything on an ongoing basis. Bluntly put, the ISPs have oversold their own local network capacity and now don't want to invest in correcting that failure. When at the same time they're announcing increasing profitability, my sympathy for them wanes.
Actually we do know how the "negotiations" leading up to this case went, because they were made part of the record. You can, if you want, go to Groklaw which, while not being updated, does have coverage of the parties' filings in the case including the letters that went back and forth between Microsoft and Motorola leading up to Motorola's initial offer. I'd note that Microsoft doesn't dispute that there were no further negotiations after Motorola's initial offer and Microsoft's filing suit.
I'd also note the amount of case law cited by Motorola which contradicts the position the judge is taking regarding negotiations in cases like this. I'll be watching the appeals court to see what they have to say about this one.
"Remember: every member of your 'target audience' also owns a broadcasting station. These 'targets' can shoot back." -- Michael Rathbun to advertisers, in n.a.n-a.e
That's why I say it'd be interesting to argue. If it were just my use of their site, those clauses would make them safe from modification of the TOS. But it's not just my use of their site, it's their use of my likeness for commercial purposes. Normally, absent some agreement with me, they don't have that right, and it was them acting by using my likeness and not me. If they argue that implicit agreement is valid, then regardless of their TOS they agreed to my terms and agreed to modify the terms of their TOS accordingly in this case. If they argue that implicit agreement is invalid, then they have to admit that they can't rely on my implicit agreement to their TOS and they were using my likeness without permission and owe me compensation for that. And since I've got proof they received my letter, they were aware of this situation before they acted and acted in a way consistent with accepting my terms and modifying their TOS, since they a) used my likeness knowing that I did not agree to the portions of their TOS that would give them permission and b) continued to act as if I had authorization to use their service rather than rejecting such access for failure to agree to the TOS.
The equivalent would be a merchant with a "no checks, no exceptions" policy hearing me say "All I have is a check.", going "That's OK." and accepting my check and ringing me up anyway, and then not cashing my check and trying to claim I hadn't paid because he doesn't accept checks in payment. Even though I knew he didn't accept checks, I have the receipt showing he did accept it in payment and I think there's a winning argument that if he weren't going to accept it he had an obligation to actually refuse to accept it and not ring me up.
That's why I put that part in about this agreement superseding any and all prior agreements, and about any agreement needing to be in writing to supersede it. That's to make it so if they use my likeness they agree that this agreement, not their TOS, controls (one of the terms they agreed to is that my terms supersede the TOS). And they can't claim my future use restored the TOS since they agreed they couldn't do that unless it was done in writing (their TOS isn't agreed to in writing).
They probably wouldn't pay voluntarily, but I think it'd be one of those things that'd be interesting to argue in court. Especially seeing as they can't argue that implicit agreement to my terms by use of my likeness is invalid without admitting that implicit agreement to their terms of use by use of their site is also invalid. That, of course, isn't a problem for me because if both are invalid Facebook still lacks a legal right to use my likeness. And I don't have to argue that I never agreed to their TOS, I can argue that I did (and thus have a right to access their site) but that my agreement with them superseded and modified that TOS without invalidating it. They could get around that by not using my image, in which case my terms wouldn't apply and their TOS would be in force, but in that case I still win since they have to filter me out of their advertising use.
I wonder what would happen if you sent a nice letter to Facebook's CS department, copied to Legal, saying:
You have stated that you wish to use my likeness in commercial content that will earn you revenue. If you wish to do so, my standard rate is $10 per view of said likeness. You may not use my likeness without compensation to me. By using my likeness you agree to pay my standard rate for each view. If you do not wish to pay, you must refrain from using my likeness. By using my likeness you agree that the terms of this agreement and the rates stated therein apply to you, that you will pay them, that this agreement supersedes any and all prior agreements and that no future agreements may supersede this agreement without an express agreement in writing between myself and Facebook.
It didn't need to be blank. He was a sysadmin, he had the root password as part of his job.
The big failure here was that the NSA isn't using a compartmentalized OS where even root's access to files etc. can be restricted (ie. TCSEC B1 or higher). Of course, B1 or higher means Windows is ruled out. Which shouldn't be a problem, the NSA itself helped develop SELinux which has the needed features so they should have a suitable OS at their fingertips. It's a lot more work maintaining it, of course.
Yes, but what do they bill for? The project didn't do any work or provide any services, so what do you create an invoice for that isn't completely fictitious? Bear in mind that fabricating an invoice can result in falsified financial records, which can cost you your 501(c)(3) status and get you in trouble with the IRS. That, I think, is the main problem: the business wants a fake invoice that they can "pay" to cover up the fact that they're donating, and the project isn't set up to do that.
By that, then, I could just start duplicating books or photographs or artwork and selling those copies and I couldn't be touched for copyright infringement. After all, the copyright holders put them out there where they could be duplicated.
But it doesn't work that way. It's not the putting it out there that allows copying. It's the granting of a license that allows copying. If I publish a book, I may put physical copies out there where they can be copied but I have not granted every reader a license to copy and distribute. And absent a license grant, they don't have any right to copy and distribute. There is no implied license except for those areas where copyright law grants such a license (eg. for the working copies needed to view a work on a computer), and those implied licenses extend only as far as copyright law says they extend (eg. those working copies may be made only for the purposes of viewing the work, if you use them for any other purpose you don't have a license). This is why, for instance, when something is published on Github without a license it's not in the public domain and it's not safe to incorporate it in your open-source software because without a license you don't have a license to make more copies and distribute them.
Let me ask this: say I've got a contract with you to handle my finances with terms in it saying you won't reveal them to anyone. I hire a private detective to come around and test you, offering you money to give him the details. He doesn't say he's working for me and doesn't give you any reason to believe he's anyone other than some random bloke asking for this. If you give him my financial details and I then haul you into court for breaking the contract, do you think the courts are going to toss my case out? Or are they going to go "You didn't know he was working for the plaintiff, you couldn't've known you weren't really giving the information out in breach of contract, as far as you knew you were breaking the contract."? I think the second's far more likely than the first (barring the detective having done something egregious like threatening your family if you didn't cough up the information).
Their case might or might not fall apart, but it wouldn't turn on whether the guy who sold you the discs worked for Disney. It'd turn on how he represented the discs and how reasonable your belief (or lack thereof) that he was a legitimate wholesale distributor was. If he claimed to you that the discs were legitimate and you could prove it (say by having a signed statement from him that he was distributing discs under an agreement with Disney to distribute them), the fact that he did work for Disney and could reasonably be presumed to be able to make that kind of statement would pretty much kill their case. But if he never represented the discs as legitimate, the court would probably look at the price and conclude you couldn't reasonably have believed a legitimate distributor would be selling legit copies for that little. If there were other indications the discs weren't on the up-and-up, like low-quality inserts and non-standard packaging, you'd almost certainly lose.
It doesn't quite work that way. Whether the copyright holder uploaded it or not is in and of itself a minor point. The question would be whether the downloader knew or reasonably would have known that the copyright holder had uploaded it and intended to distribute it. It's perfectly legal for the copyright holder to lay a trap for infringers, and the fact that it's the copyright holder laying it won't get the infringer a pass on the infringement. The only defense you might have is a claim that the copyright holder went beyond just laying a trap and actively induced people to download the files. That's going to take more than just uploading them and passively seeing who downloads them, the copyright holder would've had to go out inviting people to download the files and actively represent the files as legitimate or otherwise OK to download (if they didn't give any indication they were the copyright holder and didn't represent the files as legit, you'd still be seen as being willing to download something you knew wasn't legit without any inducement by the copyright holder).
OTOH, while the above holds true in general, Prenda isn't the general case. With all the shenanigans Prenda and Steele et. al. have pulled, if the only source for the pirated files was uploads by Prenda itself the judge may well hold that no infringement would've occurred but for Prenda's own actions and Prenda can't claim damages that they were the primary cause of. That, though, is more in the way of a sanction against Prenda for the other unethical-bordering-on-illegal actions they've taken in these cases than a defense against their claims. I wouldn't advise depending on it against a less-outrageous plaintiff.
I guess my question would be "Why the middle-man?". The insurance company's the one who decides whether the item is authorized or not. Why is the pharmacy calling someone who isn't the insurance company to find out whether it's authorized or not? Just change step 2 to "Pharmacy contacts patient's insurance company to find out what the cost of the prescription is under the patient's plan." and now the insurance company has it's records right there and can see how much is left until the limit's hit. As an added bonus we remove the extra costs introduced by that third party from the system.
No, I'm not guessing at what's involved. I wrote large chunks of a system just like that, so I know what's involved. Except that our system had an absolute hard 5-second limit on responses, enforced by the CEO showing up at your desk to find out what's going on when things glitched for more than a few minutes at a time. We tried really hard to avoid meeting him like that.
My insurance company (Aetna) already has an out-of-pocket limit on my policy. They're able to track what I've paid (at least as far as costs that're coverable under the insurance go) and determine when I've hit that limit. Every other insurance plan from every other company offered at every employer I've worked for has had the same sort of limit. The only ones that don't are the fake "insurance" policies you see offered on the low end that (if you read the fine print) aren't actually insurance, they're just a discount plan (and they don't actually pay the doctors, they pay you and you're 100% responsible for paying the bill). So if the insurance companies can keep track of out-of-pocket already, I fail to see why they'd have any difficulty doing so in the future.
Yep, but I noted that bit about publishers for a reason. It's happened before. An author sent in a manuscript to a publisher and the publisher looked it over, decided it wasn't something they wanted to publish and turned it down. A few years later another author submitted a similar story, done better, and the publisher bought it and published it. The first author then sued the publisher for having stolen his story. Well, there's the very similar story in that copy of the book right there, can't argue that it doesn't exist. The publisher read the original story, can't argue that the publisher didn't know it. So now, if you're the publisher, how do you show that you didn't tell the second author the story and have him improve on it, depriving the first author of the money he'd've gotten if you'd've published his story?
It's the same with code. If I want to use the code, all's well and good and I can do as you say. But suppose I don't want to use the code? I wouldn't get permission or do a deal, obviously. But if down the road I happen to write similar code and you find out, how do I show that I didn't copy your code after I'd looked at it? The only sure way is to not have looked at it.
The risk is still there with licensed code, but knowing the license terms I know what risks I'm taking and where. For instance, if I know the code I looked at's under the GPL I know I don't have to worry about internal use, I only have a potential risk in code that's being distributed. That narrows down what I have to check to be safe. There's also a correlation between the license terms and the likelihood that the author will get up in arms over mere similarity. Authors of GPL-licensed code for instance aren't very likely to sue over just similarity in API declarations or simple boilerplate code, it's going to take substantial similarity in significant implementation code to get them up in arms (which is the kind of thing I'd agree they should get up in arms about). The more I know about this kind of stuff, the better handle I have on how much risk I'm taking.
The issue with licensing is that you can't avoid it when dealing with copyrighted works. If you don't deal with licensing explicitly, then there is no license and the code can't safely even be looked at. The rule when it comes to defending against a charge of copyright infringement is that if you've had access to it and similarity exists it's on you to prove you didn't copy it. That's why agents and publishers have their secretaries/assistants return unsolicited manuscripts unopened, so that if they publish something similar to that story later they can show that they didn't ever have access to it and couldn't've copied it. For a hobbyist it's not much of an issue but as a professional I need to be certain what the rules are for anything that could possibly make it's way into my work, so I can make sure that either I'm following the right rules or that it doesn't make it's way into my work. If you don't tell me what your rules are, I have to assume they're the ones laid down by copyright law (ie. no rights beyond fair use) which means I need to avoid it like the plague.
In my book, the stats ought to be excluding "parked" sites, ones which don't have any content beyond a parking page. I'd also exclude sites whose only content is boilerplate advertising (eg. the one you get if you're on Cox Cable's internet service and type a nonexistent domain into your browser). I'm more interested in what servers are being used for productive work without the numbers being skewed by the guy who registered 10,000 domains related to the latest fad and is waiting to see which ones he can sell at a profit.
I used to have AT&T. I changed to T-Mobile several years ago because T-Mobile could provide service where I live and work (middle of San Diego, not exactly a rural area) and AT&T couldn't and Sprint and Verizon weren't even close to competitive on price.
I priced it out using that calculator for 4 lines (unlimited voice, unlimited messaging, 2GB data per line). T-Mobile costs $140/month for a shared plan vs. $240/month for 4 individual plans. For 2 lines it'd be $100/month shared vs. $120/month for 2 individual plans. I see exactly the opposite of the claim: the shared plan is more economical than individual plans for everything but the most limited usage. And that T-Mobile's plans are more economical than anybody else's, which may explain why T-Mobile had such a good quarter.
I'd adjust that. 9 and 10 in particular can be used in a DoS attack, which can be just as damaging as an attack that gains access to the data behind an application. I'd tend to prioritize it 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12. And the first 6 would all be high-priority items that need to be fixed soonest, the prioritization would be strictly relative (if I don't have enough people I need to decide which to put people on first, but all of them take priority over anything else).
Attitude. Some software is written by anal-retentive paranoid cynical bastards who make sure every bit of code is iron-clad and air-tight, who take any flaw as a personal insult to be exterminated. Flaw? Forget flaw, even a slight deviation from what they've determined to be correct operation is hunted down mercilessly no matter how long it takes. Any cruft in the design, anything that's not clean and perfect, is lopped off and re-done until everything fits together correctly. If that results in a delay, so be it. The only work that's discarded is work that doesn't contribute to the correctness of the result.
Other code is produced by people who're fine with leaving cruft and ugly bits in as long as they don't detect any errors coming from it. Rework and clean-up is fine, as long as it doesn't impact the delivery schedule.
3 guesses which kind of developer produces which kind of software.
That's why the second paragraph. It IMO makes a difference when Google's showing only what anybody could grab without paying or having any strings attached. It's like a publisher complaining about bootleg copies of the flyer that they left stacks of outside on the unattended table with the "Take One" sign over them. I'm not going to classify that in the same category as bootleg copies of the books inside the store that nobody can walk off with without paying (or making a deliberate effort to steal).
As far as downloading the image, what do you think that "View Image" item in the right-click menu of the browser does? Images don't fail to be fetchable just because the request isn't a result of an IMG tag. If you don't like the idea of people fetching and viewing your content directly, you probably don't want to be publishing your content on the Web. Just like if you don't want everybody with a cheap radio to be able to listen to your songs for free, you probably don't want to put them on broadcast radio.
In your example, the writer is actually copying the photos into his book. That's one thing. Google, OTOH, isn't publishing a book containing copies of the photos. They're creating an index of photos that exist. To make it minimally useful, that index has to include a thumbnail or other depiction of the photo so viewers can tell whether that's the image they were looking for or not (a prerequisite for deciding whether they want to go to where that image is published or not). I'd say that if a writer wanted to do the same thing, publish an index of where all these works were with thumbnails of them, they ought to be able to do it under fair use just like Google does. But producing an art book with full-size high-quality reproductions of the photos wouldn't be producing an index.
Also, Google only creates an index of what the publisher has made publicly available. So what Google reproduces on their pages is by definition something the publisher isn't getting paid for when people just look at it. Google doesn't go behind paywalls or subscription barriers to find things, unless perhaps the publishers have explicitly coded their site to give Google that access for free and in that case IMO it's the publisher's look-out. To me it makes a difference in what's "fair" when you're handing out full-sized copies for free, no strings attached, to anybody who grabs one off the table vs. if they can only get them by coming into your shop and plopping down their money first.
You (and most of the other comments so far) are completely missing the point of the original complaint. This isn't about malware or hackers, it's about letting a friend or stranger use your device for a moment to lookup a meeting room number, a store location, call someone because they locked themselves out, etc... By having all stored passwords easily readable after a couple quick clicks, the friend/stranger can easily view the passwords without the user knowing and attack/blackmail/prank/whatever the user later at any time in the future on multiple accounts.
I know that scenario. The problem is that most people want to avoid having to retype passwords every time one's needed, so they set things up to only require entering the master password once. When they hand their phone to the stranger, it's already unlocked and ready to compromise. Given what can be done with a smartphone these days, I simply have a policy of not lending it to people at all. With everything on it it's just too easy to get sensitive information out no matter what security's in place short of a complete lock-out of access to the phone. So that's what I have: if you aren't me, you aren't getting into the phone. If you try, the hardware's going to lock you out. Anything less and we end up playing little Dutch boy at the dike.
Slashdot Mirror
With electricity, water and such, you control how much you use. You can reduce your usage if you can't afford the higher bills.
On the Web, the web site controls how much I use. If they include an ad on their site that streams video, I can't stop them from doing it short of not visiting that site at all. And of course I don't know what they'll do until after I'm already on the site and the usage has occurred, so how exactly do I control my usage? Also, in too many cases the caps don't take into account normal or ordinary usage, they're set solely to let the ISP avoid investing in better infrastructure. Too often the caps aren't about backbone bandwidth, they're imposed because of local congestion within the ISP's own infrastructure where bandwidth isn't costing the ISP anything on an ongoing basis. Bluntly put, the ISPs have oversold their own local network capacity and now don't want to invest in correcting that failure. When at the same time they're announcing increasing profitability, my sympathy for them wanes.
Actually we do know how the "negotiations" leading up to this case went, because they were made part of the record. You can, if you want, go to Groklaw which, while not being updated, does have coverage of the parties' filings in the case including the letters that went back and forth between Microsoft and Motorola leading up to Motorola's initial offer. I'd note that Microsoft doesn't dispute that there were no further negotiations after Motorola's initial offer and Microsoft's filing suit.
I'd also note the amount of case law cited by Motorola which contradicts the position the judge is taking regarding negotiations in cases like this. I'll be watching the appeals court to see what they have to say about this one.
"Remember: every member of your 'target audience' also owns a broadcasting station. These 'targets' can shoot back."
-- Michael Rathbun to advertisers, in n.a.n-a.e
That's why I say it'd be interesting to argue. If it were just my use of their site, those clauses would make them safe from modification of the TOS. But it's not just my use of their site, it's their use of my likeness for commercial purposes. Normally, absent some agreement with me, they don't have that right, and it was them acting by using my likeness and not me. If they argue that implicit agreement is valid, then regardless of their TOS they agreed to my terms and agreed to modify the terms of their TOS accordingly in this case. If they argue that implicit agreement is invalid, then they have to admit that they can't rely on my implicit agreement to their TOS and they were using my likeness without permission and owe me compensation for that. And since I've got proof they received my letter, they were aware of this situation before they acted and acted in a way consistent with accepting my terms and modifying their TOS, since they a) used my likeness knowing that I did not agree to the portions of their TOS that would give them permission and b) continued to act as if I had authorization to use their service rather than rejecting such access for failure to agree to the TOS.
The equivalent would be a merchant with a "no checks, no exceptions" policy hearing me say "All I have is a check.", going "That's OK." and accepting my check and ringing me up anyway, and then not cashing my check and trying to claim I hadn't paid because he doesn't accept checks in payment. Even though I knew he didn't accept checks, I have the receipt showing he did accept it in payment and I think there's a winning argument that if he weren't going to accept it he had an obligation to actually refuse to accept it and not ring me up.
That's why I put that part in about this agreement superseding any and all prior agreements, and about any agreement needing to be in writing to supersede it. That's to make it so if they use my likeness they agree that this agreement, not their TOS, controls (one of the terms they agreed to is that my terms supersede the TOS). And they can't claim my future use restored the TOS since they agreed they couldn't do that unless it was done in writing (their TOS isn't agreed to in writing).
They probably wouldn't pay voluntarily, but I think it'd be one of those things that'd be interesting to argue in court. Especially seeing as they can't argue that implicit agreement to my terms by use of my likeness is invalid without admitting that implicit agreement to their terms of use by use of their site is also invalid. That, of course, isn't a problem for me because if both are invalid Facebook still lacks a legal right to use my likeness. And I don't have to argue that I never agreed to their TOS, I can argue that I did (and thus have a right to access their site) but that my agreement with them superseded and modified that TOS without invalidating it. They could get around that by not using my image, in which case my terms wouldn't apply and their TOS would be in force, but in that case I still win since they have to filter me out of their advertising use.
I wonder what would happen if you sent a nice letter to Facebook's CS department, copied to Legal, saying:
You have stated that you wish to use my likeness in commercial content that will earn you revenue. If you wish to do so, my standard rate is $10 per view of said likeness. You may not use my likeness without compensation to me. By using my likeness you agree to pay my standard rate for each view. If you do not wish to pay, you must refrain from using my likeness. By using my likeness you agree that the terms of this agreement and the rates stated therein apply to you, that you will pay them, that this agreement supersedes any and all prior agreements and that no future agreements may supersede this agreement without an express agreement in writing between myself and Facebook.
It didn't need to be blank. He was a sysadmin, he had the root password as part of his job.
The big failure here was that the NSA isn't using a compartmentalized OS where even root's access to files etc. can be restricted (ie. TCSEC B1 or higher). Of course, B1 or higher means Windows is ruled out. Which shouldn't be a problem, the NSA itself helped develop SELinux which has the needed features so they should have a suitable OS at their fingertips. It's a lot more work maintaining it, of course.
Yes, but what do they bill for? The project didn't do any work or provide any services, so what do you create an invoice for that isn't completely fictitious? Bear in mind that fabricating an invoice can result in falsified financial records, which can cost you your 501(c)(3) status and get you in trouble with the IRS. That, I think, is the main problem: the business wants a fake invoice that they can "pay" to cover up the fact that they're donating, and the project isn't set up to do that.
By that, then, I could just start duplicating books or photographs or artwork and selling those copies and I couldn't be touched for copyright infringement. After all, the copyright holders put them out there where they could be duplicated.
But it doesn't work that way. It's not the putting it out there that allows copying. It's the granting of a license that allows copying. If I publish a book, I may put physical copies out there where they can be copied but I have not granted every reader a license to copy and distribute. And absent a license grant, they don't have any right to copy and distribute. There is no implied license except for those areas where copyright law grants such a license (eg. for the working copies needed to view a work on a computer), and those implied licenses extend only as far as copyright law says they extend (eg. those working copies may be made only for the purposes of viewing the work, if you use them for any other purpose you don't have a license). This is why, for instance, when something is published on Github without a license it's not in the public domain and it's not safe to incorporate it in your open-source software because without a license you don't have a license to make more copies and distribute them.
Let me ask this: say I've got a contract with you to handle my finances with terms in it saying you won't reveal them to anyone. I hire a private detective to come around and test you, offering you money to give him the details. He doesn't say he's working for me and doesn't give you any reason to believe he's anyone other than some random bloke asking for this. If you give him my financial details and I then haul you into court for breaking the contract, do you think the courts are going to toss my case out? Or are they going to go "You didn't know he was working for the plaintiff, you couldn't've known you weren't really giving the information out in breach of contract, as far as you knew you were breaking the contract."? I think the second's far more likely than the first (barring the detective having done something egregious like threatening your family if you didn't cough up the information).
Their case might or might not fall apart, but it wouldn't turn on whether the guy who sold you the discs worked for Disney. It'd turn on how he represented the discs and how reasonable your belief (or lack thereof) that he was a legitimate wholesale distributor was. If he claimed to you that the discs were legitimate and you could prove it (say by having a signed statement from him that he was distributing discs under an agreement with Disney to distribute them), the fact that he did work for Disney and could reasonably be presumed to be able to make that kind of statement would pretty much kill their case. But if he never represented the discs as legitimate, the court would probably look at the price and conclude you couldn't reasonably have believed a legitimate distributor would be selling legit copies for that little. If there were other indications the discs weren't on the up-and-up, like low-quality inserts and non-standard packaging, you'd almost certainly lose.
It doesn't quite work that way. Whether the copyright holder uploaded it or not is in and of itself a minor point. The question would be whether the downloader knew or reasonably would have known that the copyright holder had uploaded it and intended to distribute it. It's perfectly legal for the copyright holder to lay a trap for infringers, and the fact that it's the copyright holder laying it won't get the infringer a pass on the infringement. The only defense you might have is a claim that the copyright holder went beyond just laying a trap and actively induced people to download the files. That's going to take more than just uploading them and passively seeing who downloads them, the copyright holder would've had to go out inviting people to download the files and actively represent the files as legitimate or otherwise OK to download (if they didn't give any indication they were the copyright holder and didn't represent the files as legit, you'd still be seen as being willing to download something you knew wasn't legit without any inducement by the copyright holder).
OTOH, while the above holds true in general, Prenda isn't the general case. With all the shenanigans Prenda and Steele et. al. have pulled, if the only source for the pirated files was uploads by Prenda itself the judge may well hold that no infringement would've occurred but for Prenda's own actions and Prenda can't claim damages that they were the primary cause of. That, though, is more in the way of a sanction against Prenda for the other unethical-bordering-on-illegal actions they've taken in these cases than a defense against their claims. I wouldn't advise depending on it against a less-outrageous plaintiff.
I guess my question would be "Why the middle-man?". The insurance company's the one who decides whether the item is authorized or not. Why is the pharmacy calling someone who isn't the insurance company to find out whether it's authorized or not? Just change step 2 to "Pharmacy contacts patient's insurance company to find out what the cost of the prescription is under the patient's plan." and now the insurance company has it's records right there and can see how much is left until the limit's hit. As an added bonus we remove the extra costs introduced by that third party from the system.
No, I'm not guessing at what's involved. I wrote large chunks of a system just like that, so I know what's involved. Except that our system had an absolute hard 5-second limit on responses, enforced by the CEO showing up at your desk to find out what's going on when things glitched for more than a few minutes at a time. We tried really hard to avoid meeting him like that.
My insurance company (Aetna) already has an out-of-pocket limit on my policy. They're able to track what I've paid (at least as far as costs that're coverable under the insurance go) and determine when I've hit that limit. Every other insurance plan from every other company offered at every employer I've worked for has had the same sort of limit. The only ones that don't are the fake "insurance" policies you see offered on the low end that (if you read the fine print) aren't actually insurance, they're just a discount plan (and they don't actually pay the doctors, they pay you and you're 100% responsible for paying the bill). So if the insurance companies can keep track of out-of-pocket already, I fail to see why they'd have any difficulty doing so in the future.
Yep, but I noted that bit about publishers for a reason. It's happened before. An author sent in a manuscript to a publisher and the publisher looked it over, decided it wasn't something they wanted to publish and turned it down. A few years later another author submitted a similar story, done better, and the publisher bought it and published it. The first author then sued the publisher for having stolen his story. Well, there's the very similar story in that copy of the book right there, can't argue that it doesn't exist. The publisher read the original story, can't argue that the publisher didn't know it. So now, if you're the publisher, how do you show that you didn't tell the second author the story and have him improve on it, depriving the first author of the money he'd've gotten if you'd've published his story?
It's the same with code. If I want to use the code, all's well and good and I can do as you say. But suppose I don't want to use the code? I wouldn't get permission or do a deal, obviously. But if down the road I happen to write similar code and you find out, how do I show that I didn't copy your code after I'd looked at it? The only sure way is to not have looked at it.
The risk is still there with licensed code, but knowing the license terms I know what risks I'm taking and where. For instance, if I know the code I looked at's under the GPL I know I don't have to worry about internal use, I only have a potential risk in code that's being distributed. That narrows down what I have to check to be safe. There's also a correlation between the license terms and the likelihood that the author will get up in arms over mere similarity. Authors of GPL-licensed code for instance aren't very likely to sue over just similarity in API declarations or simple boilerplate code, it's going to take substantial similarity in significant implementation code to get them up in arms (which is the kind of thing I'd agree they should get up in arms about). The more I know about this kind of stuff, the better handle I have on how much risk I'm taking.
The issue with licensing is that you can't avoid it when dealing with copyrighted works. If you don't deal with licensing explicitly, then there is no license and the code can't safely even be looked at. The rule when it comes to defending against a charge of copyright infringement is that if you've had access to it and similarity exists it's on you to prove you didn't copy it. That's why agents and publishers have their secretaries/assistants return unsolicited manuscripts unopened, so that if they publish something similar to that story later they can show that they didn't ever have access to it and couldn't've copied it. For a hobbyist it's not much of an issue but as a professional I need to be certain what the rules are for anything that could possibly make it's way into my work, so I can make sure that either I'm following the right rules or that it doesn't make it's way into my work. If you don't tell me what your rules are, I have to assume they're the ones laid down by copyright law (ie. no rights beyond fair use) which means I need to avoid it like the plague.
In my book, the stats ought to be excluding "parked" sites, ones which don't have any content beyond a parking page. I'd also exclude sites whose only content is boilerplate advertising (eg. the one you get if you're on Cox Cable's internet service and type a nonexistent domain into your browser). I'm more interested in what servers are being used for productive work without the numbers being skewed by the guy who registered 10,000 domains related to the latest fad and is waiting to see which ones he can sell at a profit.
... "circle the drain" is not a game plan...
I used to have AT&T. I changed to T-Mobile several years ago because T-Mobile could provide service where I live and work (middle of San Diego, not exactly a rural area) and AT&T couldn't and Sprint and Verizon weren't even close to competitive on price.
I priced it out using that calculator for 4 lines (unlimited voice, unlimited messaging, 2GB data per line). T-Mobile costs $140/month for a shared plan vs. $240/month for 4 individual plans. For 2 lines it'd be $100/month shared vs. $120/month for 2 individual plans. I see exactly the opposite of the claim: the shared plan is more economical than individual plans for everything but the most limited usage. And that T-Mobile's plans are more economical than anybody else's, which may explain why T-Mobile had such a good quarter.
I'd adjust that. 9 and 10 in particular can be used in a DoS attack, which can be just as damaging as an attack that gains access to the data behind an application. I'd tend to prioritize it 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12. And the first 6 would all be high-priority items that need to be fixed soonest, the prioritization would be strictly relative (if I don't have enough people I need to decide which to put people on first, but all of them take priority over anything else).
Attitude. Some software is written by anal-retentive paranoid cynical bastards who make sure every bit of code is iron-clad and air-tight, who take any flaw as a personal insult to be exterminated. Flaw? Forget flaw, even a slight deviation from what they've determined to be correct operation is hunted down mercilessly no matter how long it takes. Any cruft in the design, anything that's not clean and perfect, is lopped off and re-done until everything fits together correctly. If that results in a delay, so be it. The only work that's discarded is work that doesn't contribute to the correctness of the result.
Other code is produced by people who're fine with leaving cruft and ugly bits in as long as they don't detect any errors coming from it. Rework and clean-up is fine, as long as it doesn't impact the delivery schedule.
3 guesses which kind of developer produces which kind of software.
That's why the second paragraph. It IMO makes a difference when Google's showing only what anybody could grab without paying or having any strings attached. It's like a publisher complaining about bootleg copies of the flyer that they left stacks of outside on the unattended table with the "Take One" sign over them. I'm not going to classify that in the same category as bootleg copies of the books inside the store that nobody can walk off with without paying (or making a deliberate effort to steal).
As far as downloading the image, what do you think that "View Image" item in the right-click menu of the browser does? Images don't fail to be fetchable just because the request isn't a result of an IMG tag. If you don't like the idea of people fetching and viewing your content directly, you probably don't want to be publishing your content on the Web. Just like if you don't want everybody with a cheap radio to be able to listen to your songs for free, you probably don't want to put them on broadcast radio.
In your example, the writer is actually copying the photos into his book. That's one thing. Google, OTOH, isn't publishing a book containing copies of the photos. They're creating an index of photos that exist. To make it minimally useful, that index has to include a thumbnail or other depiction of the photo so viewers can tell whether that's the image they were looking for or not (a prerequisite for deciding whether they want to go to where that image is published or not). I'd say that if a writer wanted to do the same thing, publish an index of where all these works were with thumbnails of them, they ought to be able to do it under fair use just like Google does. But producing an art book with full-size high-quality reproductions of the photos wouldn't be producing an index.
Also, Google only creates an index of what the publisher has made publicly available. So what Google reproduces on their pages is by definition something the publisher isn't getting paid for when people just look at it. Google doesn't go behind paywalls or subscription barriers to find things, unless perhaps the publishers have explicitly coded their site to give Google that access for free and in that case IMO it's the publisher's look-out. To me it makes a difference in what's "fair" when you're handing out full-sized copies for free, no strings attached, to anybody who grabs one off the table vs. if they can only get them by coming into your shop and plopping down their money first.
I know that scenario. The problem is that most people want to avoid having to retype passwords every time one's needed, so they set things up to only require entering the master password once. When they hand their phone to the stranger, it's already unlocked and ready to compromise. Given what can be done with a smartphone these days, I simply have a policy of not lending it to people at all. With everything on it it's just too easy to get sensitive information out no matter what security's in place short of a complete lock-out of access to the phone. So that's what I have: if you aren't me, you aren't getting into the phone. If you try, the hardware's going to lock you out. Anything less and we end up playing little Dutch boy at the dike.