I'm not making any statement about right or wrong, or political theory, or diplomatic convention, or international law; I'm merely pointing to facts I know - many nations *do* claim extra-territorial jurisdiction, under some circumstances (and a *lot* of people argue that they should be doing it more, or doing it less).
Here are some links referring to extra-territorial jurisdiction (or universal jurisdiction - the idea that some crimes are so terrible that every court has jurisdiction for the crime):
a UN resolution "Adopting the resolution by a recorded vote of 133 in favour to two against (Israel, United States) and two abstentions (Australia, Latvia), the Assembly reiterated its call for the repeal of unilateral extraterritorial laws that imposed coercive measures contrary to international law on corporations and nationals of other States."
(html from google) PrincetonPDF hosts an article titled "Multinational Pharmaceutical Corporations and U.S. Extraterritorial Jurisdiction". It has a nice description about some exceptions to absolute sovereignty, some of which are widely recognized, and some not.
Turns out I was mistaken about "Belgian prosecuter", it's "Belgian attorney" - Belgium has a law allowing extraterritorial private war crimes lawsuits.
You can find it all over the net if you google, here's a reputable link, an article from the BBC.
Are you saying that a nation can pass a law giving itself legal juristiction in another nation?
Yes, the original poster is saying that, and the original poster is correct; you haven't been paying attention have you?
U.S. law has a number of "extra-territorial" provisions, particularly in respect to U.S. citizens or U.S. business overseas. For example 18 USC Sec. 2332a gives U.S. Courts jurisdiction over people who "without lawful authority, uses, threatens, or attempts or conspires to use, a weapon of mass destruction" against:
a U.S. citizen outside the U.S.
any person within the United States
any property that is owned, leased or used by the United States
The U.S. is not unique in this regard. Israel prosecuted and executed Adolf Eichmann for crimes that occured in Europe during the Holocaust, before Israel even existed (the only death sentence ever carried out in Israel, btw). A Belgian prosecuter recently initiated "war crimes" proceedings against U.S. General Tommy Franks, for events that occured in the Iraq war.
I wonder if a "robots.txt" file is a "technological measure to effectively control access to a copyrighted work"
I doubt it. To me, a "robots.txt" (with a global exclude) is more like a "keep out" sign, not a "lock on the door". Perhaps a site that rejects non-browser User-Agents might qualify though. A spider that spoofs a browser User-Agent would then be "circumventing" an access control...
Either way, you would have to hold the copyright of the work accessed to file a DMCA complaint though.
There's a lot of things that affect your chances, age is just one of them.
At my company (if we were hiring), we'd only hire experienced programmers (including former interns) right now. "Just out of school" with no practical experience wouldn't be considered. This is a product of both the current state of the company and the local hiring market; we're very short-term focused currently and there's a glut of good people in our local market - I personally know over a dozen good programmers who've been job-hunting in the last 3 months. If we hire, we're going to cherry-pick.
However, some other factors that will influence the ability of a new coder to land a job are:
contacts - a very large amount of jobs still get filled (at least in part) via contacts and "word of mouth". Especially smaller employers like to have someone they know vouch for the candidate, at least to the extent that the candidate isn't a total asshole and some companies now won't give more than a "yes, he worked on those dates" reference for former employees, for fear of lawsuits. Get yourself friends and associates in the business area you would like to work in.
grades - they're just about the only evidence that you're competent in your new field.
previous work experience - a lot of programming deals with particular business or technical information and someone with experince in a particular field will have a chance landing a job programming for that field; a former nurse at medical supply co., an accounting clerk for a in-house accounting software, etc. Most disciplines are getting computerized to at least some extent, so an older worker can try to put experience to work in the new job. I know of an ex-"blue collar" guy who used to work warehouse and delivery jobs and had to re-train after an accident; he managed to (eventually) get a job working on inventory software despite being over 50 with some modest disabilities. He started in Quality Assurance and then managed an in-house transfer to a coding position.
the local market - if experienced people are on the streets looking for work, new coders are competing to some extent with that pool of talent. Newer training and lower salary demands can somewhat counter-balance this though.
language skills - multilingual coders have an edge for some positions
I've never believed that use of a sample necessarily led to the creation of a derivative work. A derivative work is legally defined in the statute, 17 USC 101 :
A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work".
As I read this, to be a "derivative work", the base work must be "recast, transformed, or adapted", i.e. modified but still recognizably the same (more or less whole) work.
While a quote, reference, or sample may be "derivative" in everyday terms or in some sort of academic analysis, it doesn't seem to meet the legal definition.
However, with all the sampling decisions so far, it seems that Federal judges don't agree with me, the bastards...
To make this clear with an example, let's assume that Moby Dick is still copyrighted. I don't exactly think that beginning a new novel with '"Call me Ishmael", he said snidely.' would make the new novel a legal "derivative work" of Moby Dick, despite the intellectual heritage.
And if you don't remember to set the simple-minded check box on from its default off state EVERY GODDAMN TIME you end up with an inconsistent set of records. I used to have a reminder set monthly to go clean up our win2k DNS (until we got some competent admins who knew what PTR records were).
Nice to hear that someone else is basing their business on TJDO (my company puts the the "T" in TJDO, though the bulk of active development is now coming from outside the co.)
Your remark about "JDO insulates..." is spot-on; JDO isn't a panacea, by any means. It uses some resources that a hand-coded approach wouldn't, and naive programmers can tie a program in knots with bottlenecks or even resource deadlocks if they're sufficiently "inventive". However, being able to run the same code base against Oracle 8 or MySQL is worth a little cost, and the "inventive" programmer can screw things up in any language. It does seem to make persistence more mundane, freeing developer time for more work on business/feature logic.
It wasn't worth that much. The RIAA asked for the moon, and legally naive people did the math and came up with a huge number as what the RIAA was asking for. All those limitations and others would have come into play in coming up with a damage figure. However, it's not the RIAA that gets to set damages, it's a jury, as constrained by the law and the judge.
Copyright law in general can be found here and the major section on damages is 17 USC 504 , but don't overlook the other sections, especially 505 - the prevailing party can ask for but is not guaranteed attornies fees and costs (but you have to be able to pay your lawyer until you win, and then hope the judge decides it's "just" for you to recover your expenses.)
It's a max of $150,000 per work, not per copy. And to get that, instead of the default $30,000, you have to prove that it was the infringement was "committed willfully". Furthermore, by statute, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work, so there's a strong argument that an album ripped to MP3s would have to be counted as 1 work for the album, rather than n works for each track.
"Wilfully" is a lot more than "intentional"; I don't have a good legal definition, though the online law dictionaries seem to go with "intentionally, purposefully and stubbornly", i.e. you know its wrong, you know you're going to get caught, and you do it anyway.
Since the people running indexing services have good reason to believe the services are legal, they've got a great defense against the "wilfull" add-on (if only they could afford to defend themselves).
Today I happen to be having my nose rubbed in my own comment...
I happen to be looking for a number of hit songs from 1953 (in-laws 50th wedding anniversary coming up soon...), and it's truly appalling how many hit songs are tough or impossible to track down 50 years later. For example, Leslie Caron had a hit with Hi-Lili-Hi-Lo, a sugar-sweet ditty from the movie Lili (not Darling Lili, the 17-years-later Julie Andrews thing). So far, in a week's worth of searching, I can't find a copy of the song, the movie soundtrack, or the movie. It's probably out there somewhere, but I haven't found it for purchase yet.
While I've found a lot of vintage hits from the year that are included on great artists "Best of" or other restrospective works (although they're sometimes imports from Europe), it's hit and miss with the 2nd tier artists, and if it wasn't a hit it's nearly impossible to find. A part of that is the economics of supply and demand, of course, but if it weren't for copyright I could go into a library and duplicate archived works. As it stands now, for many of things I want, I can't buy it and I can't pay some one to make me a copy of it, at least until long after the people I want to give a compilation to have been dead for some time.
Point *somewhat* taken, there would definitely be some "market effect", particularly in genre fiction, but you overstate it drastically. There are already more works in the public domain than anyone could read in a lifetime. There are even thousands of good, interesting, famous works. All of Blake, Burns, Dickens, Malthus, Machiavelli, Poe, Shakespeare, Shelley, Wister, Wordsworth, etc., etc., etc.. And even in genre fiction, the heydey of the "dime store novel" was last century; there are a bazillion cruddy western novels that are in the public domain.
However, the copyright monopoly does not exist for the benefit of the publishers; we the people grant the copyright monopoly to encourage publication. If the monopoly privilege is no longer serving its constitutional pupose, it should be withdrawn. The Constituion says:
The Congress shall have Power To [...] promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
If copyright is getting in the way of access to the works, then it needs adjustment. Personally, I vacillate between returning to a short term, e.g. the 14 and 14 of the Founders, and a "pay as you go" copyright, with a cheap initial registration and progressively more expensive renewals (say, every 10 years) with a 50 or 100 year max...
If you're going to argue this point, you need to do better than reference a couple of the greatest SF books of all time; by their nature, they are exceptions. You're going to need numbers that give us the longevity of the typical work, not the exceptional one.
My numbers: In 1930, 10,027 books were published. Today, 174 of those books are still in print. Source: a Red Herring article on copyright
The other 9,853 books are not deemed worth the cost of keeping in print, or the rights owner has died and no one knows who has the power to grant permission, or a thousand different reasons, all of which keep the work "frozen", even if someone wants to do something with it as a labor of love, or perhaps in a niche market that doesn't interest the rights holder.
Keep in mind that, for the vast majority of works, the slope of the sales curve is initially very steep; 80% of a typical paperback title's copies are sold in the first 3 months (source). Or consider music; for the last few years there have been about 25,000 to 35,000 new titles released each year, of these about 7,000 are released on major labels, and of those only about 10% are profitable (source). We can safely assume that the unprofitable titles go out of print. A small percentage are re-issued by indie labels, but again, the majority of titles end up in the vault, waiting for copyright to expire, useful to no one.
My personal view on the "morality" question is that, primarily, "tools" such as the DMCA have no morality in themselves, it's the intent of the use that matters (consider knives, e.g.). However, this is complicated when a tool that is commonly and easily abused is used for good; the risk is that the good use is used to justify the existence of the tool despite the bad use. (consider handguns entirely made of non-metal that don't have serial numbers and won't hold a fingerprint - so what if they have some benign use). So using the DMCA for "good" is problematic...
A lawsuit can be filed without knowing details about the copyright infringer; cases are filed all the time against "John Doe, the person who did X". Once a case is properly filed, the suing party can subpoena anybody who has information about the problem, including anybody who knows who "John Doe" is.
The DMCA would let you avoid a lot of this rigamarole; that's part of what sold it in Congress and when you just want the problem to stop it's an almost reasonably crafted solution. "Owner" notifies; service provider takes down; poster gets the opportunity to challenge and get things back up, all without getting the lawyers involved (in theory). If only the reality had matched the plan.
I'm not a lawyer but I thought that the "duty to mitigate" was still a part of tort law.
In essence, the principle is that, when you to notice you're being injured, if you don't take "reasonable" efforts to stop the injury, the person you subsequently sue about it isn't responsible for the damages caused after you noticed the problem and decided to ignore it.
For example, suppose a prankster lights your home's door-mat on fire, rings the bell and runs. If you open the door, see the fire, ignored it, and it burns down your house, in theory you're only entitled to sue for the damage to the doormat, because any reasonable person would have done something (call the fire department, if nothing else). If you try and fail to do something "reasonable", or aren't competent to do it, or aren't home, then you get to sue for the cost of the whole house; the prankster doesn't get a free pass for "someone *should* have been able to put it out".
In the MTU/RIAA case, if the RIAA let the problem "build up" because they wanted a headline-grabbing lawsuit, then they failed to mitigate their damages and shouldn't be allowed to claim them past the point they first noticed the problem, if this were a normal tort case.
However, since this is a Federal copyright case, I'm not sure if "duty to mitigate" applies. I can't think of a reason it wouldn't, but copyright law has its own special nooks and crannies and I have never seen it come up in any of the cases I've looked at.
"Prior art" is any published resource publicly available to the knowlegable practitioner in the field, whether it's an actual working implementation, or a description of the idea sufficiently detailed for the knowlegable practitioner in the field to actually implement.
Indeed. Processor MHz as a measure of performance is somewhat analogous to RPM as a measure of a car engine's performance... It's the gearing that determines at what speed the car will go (assuming the engine produces enough power to drive the load).
In no particular order, authors I'm willing to recommend...
Emily Devenport - "Shade" (SF)
Connie Willis - "Doomesday Book" or "To Say Nothing of the Dog" (both time travel novels) (actually "Passage" is a literature knockout, but it's disturbed me enough I won't read it again, nor recommend it...)
John Barnes - "Mother of Storms" (SF)
Lois McMaster Bujold - "The Spirit Ring" (magic fantasy) or "The Warrior's Apprentice" ("space opera" SF) (but the latter is part of a loose "series")
David Brin - "Glory Season" (SF)
Sheri Tepper - "Grass" (SF) or her 80s fantasies, the "True Game" nonology or the "Marianne" trilogy
George R. R. Martin - "Storm of Swords" ("medieval" fantasy)
Kim Stanley Robinson - the "Mars" trilogy (SF, a lot more "future science" than anything else on the list)
Robert Holdstock - "Mythago Wood" (mythic fantasy)
"Intellectual property" is great example of "semantic creep".
The term was first used by specialists - law school professors - to categorize the law of patents, trademark, copyright, and trade secrets (and probably other stuff). All of these are valuable intangibles with very, very different legal basis; however they tend to get lumped together in law school because they're more similar to each other than they are to anything else. Legal people are of course very aware of those differences; patent attornies don't normally do copyright work and vice versa...
Because it was a handy term, it made its way into general usage, but like many technical terms that migrate into the public realm, the nuances of meaning don't always make it (e.g. "hacker"). To a legal person, there's lots of kinds of property, with all sorts of attributes, such as expiration (e.g. a stock option); to the average lay person, if the hear "something property", they think about the kind of property they know best, personal property, and assume that this new kind of property has most of those attributes, including permenant ownership and total control.
In other words, personal property is the lay person's prototype when thinking about property of any kind, and "intellectual property" has been used to shift the ground of the debate by inducing assumptions about the nature of a copyright.
In developing web apps, the back button is a real !@#@!%!
Agreed.
And many web applications that implement some sort of stateful behavior *still* break in weird and wonderful ways when a user backs up. Developers tend to dismiss "back" as something users shouldn't do...
Yea, but the problem with History (after browsing through 80 sites) is that you have to know the name of the host with the content you're interested in.
Was that interesting news item on Windows on bugtraq.com, securityfocus.com, zdnet.com, news.com, register.com,...
Without context or clues, you have to search through a lot of history, remember or write down URLs, or give up...
The classic example of jury nullification is the refusal of English juries to convict banknote forgers when the penalty was death.
"When in respect of any class of offenses the difficulty of obtaining convictions is at all general in England, we may hold it as an axiom, that the law requires amendment. Such conduct in juries is the silent protest of the people against its undue severity. This was strongly exemplified in the case of prosecutions for the forgery of bank-notes, when it was a capital felony. It was in vain that the charge was proved. Juries would not condemn men to the gallows for an offense of which the punishment was out of all proportion to the crime; and as they could not mitigate the sentence they brought in verdicts of Not Guilty. The consequence was, that the law was changed; and when secondary punishments were substituted for the penalty of death, a forger had no better chance of an acquittal than any other criminal. Thus it is that the power which juries possess of refusing to put the law in force has, in the words of Lord John Russell, `been the cause of amending many bad laws which the judges would have administered with professional bigotry, and above all, it has this important and useful consequence, that laws totally repugnant to the feelings of the community for which they are made, can not long prevail in England.'" W. Forsyth, History of Trial by Jury 367-368 (2d ed. 1971).
Yes, but you were working at a company with a high clued-to-clueless ratio among the users, a relatively atypical user population. For example, most BMC employees (excluding management) who fill up their hard drives will recognize the problem and self-help; much fewer employees at an insurance firm would do so.
Also, BMC Software is a company that specializes in IT service products (albeit much of it for mainframes and servers), so it's unsurprising that:
a) they have top people in IT themselves
b) they're IT infrastructure is compentently set up
Slashdot Mirror
Here are some links referring to extra-territorial jurisdiction (or universal jurisdiction - the idea that some crimes are so terrible that every court has jurisdiction for the crime):
You can find it all over the net if you google, here's a reputable link, an article from the BBC.
Yes, the original poster is saying that, and the original poster is correct; you haven't been paying attention have you?
U.S. law has a number of "extra-territorial" provisions, particularly in respect to U.S. citizens or U.S. business overseas. For example 18 USC Sec. 2332a gives U.S. Courts jurisdiction over people who "without lawful authority, uses, threatens, or attempts or conspires to use, a weapon of mass destruction" against:
The U.S. is not unique in this regard. Israel prosecuted and executed Adolf Eichmann for crimes that occured in Europe during the Holocaust, before Israel even existed (the only death sentence ever carried out in Israel, btw). A Belgian prosecuter recently initiated "war crimes" proceedings against U.S. General Tommy Franks, for events that occured in the Iraq war.
I doubt it. To me, a "robots.txt" (with a global exclude) is more like a "keep out" sign, not a "lock on the door". Perhaps a site that rejects non-browser User-Agents might qualify though. A spider that spoofs a browser User-Agent would then be "circumventing" an access control...
Either way, you would have to hold the copyright of the work accessed to file a DMCA complaint though.
At my company (if we were hiring), we'd only hire experienced programmers (including former interns) right now. "Just out of school" with no practical experience wouldn't be considered. This is a product of both the current state of the company and the local hiring market; we're very short-term focused currently and there's a glut of good people in our local market - I personally know over a dozen good programmers who've been job-hunting in the last 3 months. If we hire, we're going to cherry-pick.
However, some other factors that will influence the ability of a new coder to land a job are:
- contacts - a very large amount of jobs still get filled (at least in part) via contacts and "word of mouth". Especially smaller employers like to have someone they know vouch for the candidate, at least to the extent that the candidate isn't a total asshole and some companies now won't give more than a "yes, he worked on those dates" reference for former employees, for fear of lawsuits. Get yourself friends and associates in the business area you would like to work in.
- grades - they're just about the only evidence that you're competent in your new field.
- previous work experience - a lot of programming deals with particular business or technical information and someone with experince in a particular field will have a chance landing a job programming for that field; a former nurse at medical supply co., an accounting clerk for a in-house accounting software, etc. Most disciplines are getting computerized to at least some extent, so an older worker can try to put experience to work in the new job. I know of an ex-"blue collar" guy who used to work warehouse and delivery jobs and had to re-train after an accident; he managed to (eventually) get a job working on inventory software despite being over 50 with some modest disabilities. He started in Quality Assurance and then managed an in-house transfer to a coding position.
- the local market - if experienced people are on the streets looking for work, new coders are competing to some extent with that pool of talent. Newer training and lower salary demands can somewhat counter-balance this though.
- language skills - multilingual coders have an edge for some positions
Good luck.I've never believed that use of a sample necessarily led to the creation of a derivative work. A derivative work is legally defined in the statute, 17 USC 101 :
As I read this, to be a "derivative work", the base work must be "recast, transformed, or adapted", i.e. modified but still recognizably the same (more or less whole) work.
While a quote, reference, or sample may be "derivative" in everyday terms or in some sort of academic analysis, it doesn't seem to meet the legal definition.
However, with all the sampling decisions so far, it seems that Federal judges don't agree with me, the bastards...
To make this clear with an example, let's assume that Moby Dick is still copyrighted. I don't exactly think that beginning a new novel with '"Call me Ishmael", he said snidely.' would make the new novel a legal "derivative work" of Moby Dick, despite the intellectual heritage.
And if you don't remember to set the simple-minded check box on from its default off state EVERY GODDAMN TIME you end up with an inconsistent set of records. I used to have a reminder set monthly to go clean up our win2k DNS (until we got some competent admins who knew what PTR records were).
Your remark about "JDO insulates..." is spot-on; JDO isn't a panacea, by any means. It uses some resources that a hand-coded approach wouldn't, and naive programmers can tie a program in knots with bottlenecks or even resource deadlocks if they're sufficiently "inventive". However, being able to run the same code base against Oracle 8 or MySQL is worth a little cost, and the "inventive" programmer can screw things up in any language. It does seem to make persistence more mundane, freeing developer time for more work on business/feature logic.
It wasn't worth that much. The RIAA asked for the moon, and legally naive people did the math and came up with a huge number as what the RIAA was asking for. All those limitations and others would have come into play in coming up with a damage figure. However, it's not the RIAA that gets to set damages, it's a jury, as constrained by the law and the judge.
Copyright law in general can be found here and the major section on damages is 17 USC 504 , but don't overlook the other sections, especially 505 - the prevailing party can ask for but is not guaranteed attornies fees and costs (but you have to be able to pay your lawyer until you win, and then hope the judge decides it's "just" for you to recover your expenses.)
It's a max of $150,000 per work, not per copy. And to get that, instead of the default $30,000, you have to prove that it was the infringement was "committed willfully". Furthermore, by statute, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work, so there's a strong argument that an album ripped to MP3s would have to be counted as 1 work for the album, rather than n works for each track.
"Wilfully" is a lot more than "intentional"; I don't have a good legal definition, though the online law dictionaries seem to go with "intentionally, purposefully and stubbornly", i.e. you know its wrong, you know you're going to get caught, and you do it anyway.
Since the people running indexing services have good reason to believe the services are legal, they've got a great defense against the "wilfull" add-on (if only they could afford to defend themselves).
Today I happen to be having my nose rubbed in my own comment...
I happen to be looking for a number of hit songs from 1953 (in-laws 50th wedding anniversary coming up soon...), and it's truly appalling how many hit songs are tough or impossible to track down 50 years later. For example, Leslie Caron had a hit with Hi-Lili-Hi-Lo, a sugar-sweet ditty from the movie Lili (not Darling Lili, the 17-years-later Julie Andrews thing). So far, in a week's worth of searching, I can't find a copy of the song, the movie soundtrack, or the movie. It's probably out there somewhere, but I haven't found it for purchase yet.
While I've found a lot of vintage hits from the year that are included on great artists "Best of" or other restrospective works (although they're sometimes imports from Europe), it's hit and miss with the 2nd tier artists, and if it wasn't a hit it's nearly impossible to find. A part of that is the economics of supply and demand, of course, but if it weren't for copyright I could go into a library and duplicate archived works. As it stands now, for many of things I want, I can't buy it and I can't pay some one to make me a copy of it, at least until long after the people I want to give a compilation to have been dead for some time.
However, the copyright monopoly does not exist for the benefit of the publishers; we the people grant the copyright monopoly to encourage publication. If the monopoly privilege is no longer serving its constitutional pupose, it should be withdrawn. The Constituion says:
If copyright is getting in the way of access to the works, then it needs adjustment. Personally, I vacillate between returning to a short term, e.g. the 14 and 14 of the Founders, and a "pay as you go" copyright, with a cheap initial registration and progressively more expensive renewals (say, every 10 years) with a 50 or 100 year max...Is not! Is so! IS NOT! IS SO!
If you're going to argue this point, you need to do better than reference a couple of the greatest SF books of all time; by their nature, they are exceptions. You're going to need numbers that give us the longevity of the typical work, not the exceptional one.
My numbers:
In 1930, 10,027 books were published. Today, 174 of those books are still in print. Source: a Red Herring article on copyright
The other 9,853 books are not deemed worth the cost of keeping in print, or the rights owner has died and no one knows who has the power to grant permission, or a thousand different reasons, all of which keep the work "frozen", even if someone wants to do something with it as a labor of love, or perhaps in a niche market that doesn't interest the rights holder.
Keep in mind that, for the vast majority of works, the slope of the sales curve is initially very steep; 80% of a typical paperback title's copies are sold in the first 3 months (source). Or consider music; for the last few years there have been about 25,000 to 35,000 new titles released each year, of these about 7,000 are released on major labels, and of those only about 10% are profitable (source). We can safely assume that the unprofitable titles go out of print. A small percentage are re-issued by indie labels, but again, the majority of titles end up in the vault, waiting for copyright to expire, useful to no one.
Most works under copyright are out of print, because the publisher can see no economic reason to keep it in print.
A lawsuit can be filed without knowing details about the copyright infringer; cases are filed all the time against "John Doe, the person who did X". Once a case is properly filed, the suing party can subpoena anybody who has information about the problem, including anybody who knows who "John Doe" is.
The DMCA would let you avoid a lot of this rigamarole; that's part of what sold it in Congress and when you just want the problem to stop it's an almost reasonably crafted solution. "Owner" notifies; service provider takes down; poster gets the opportunity to challenge and get things back up, all without getting the lawyers involved (in theory). If only the reality had matched the plan.
I'm not a lawyer but I thought that the "duty to mitigate" was still a part of tort law.
In essence, the principle is that, when you to notice you're being injured, if you don't take "reasonable" efforts to stop the injury, the person you subsequently sue about it isn't responsible for the damages caused after you noticed the problem and decided to ignore it.
For example, suppose a prankster lights your home's door-mat on fire, rings the bell and runs. If you open the door, see the fire, ignored it, and it burns down your house, in theory you're only entitled to sue for the damage to the doormat, because any reasonable person would have done something (call the fire department, if nothing else). If you try and fail to do something "reasonable", or aren't competent to do it, or aren't home, then you get to sue for the cost of the whole house; the prankster doesn't get a free pass for "someone *should* have been able to put it out".
In the MTU/RIAA case, if the RIAA let the problem "build up" because they wanted a headline-grabbing lawsuit, then they failed to mitigate their damages and shouldn't be allowed to claim them past the point they first noticed the problem, if this were a normal tort case.
However, since this is a Federal copyright case, I'm not sure if "duty to mitigate" applies. I can't think of a reason it wouldn't, but copyright law has its own special nooks and crannies and I have never seen it come up in any of the cases I've looked at.
"Prior art" is any published resource publicly available to the knowlegable practitioner in the field, whether it's an actual working implementation, or a description of the idea sufficiently detailed for the knowlegable practitioner in the field to actually implement.
Indeed. Processor MHz as a measure of performance is somewhat analogous to RPM as a measure of a car engine's performance... It's the gearing that determines at what speed the car will go (assuming the engine produces enough power to drive the load).
Hmmm... I though all his "Tuf" books came after his screenplay days...
The term was first used by specialists - law school professors - to categorize the law of patents, trademark, copyright, and trade secrets (and probably other stuff). All of these are valuable intangibles with very, very different legal basis; however they tend to get lumped together in law school because they're more similar to each other than they are to anything else. Legal people are of course very aware of those differences; patent attornies don't normally do copyright work and vice versa...
Because it was a handy term, it made its way into general usage, but like many technical terms that migrate into the public realm, the nuances of meaning don't always make it (e.g. "hacker"). To a legal person, there's lots of kinds of property, with all sorts of attributes, such as expiration (e.g. a stock option); to the average lay person, if the hear "something property", they think about the kind of property they know best, personal property, and assume that this new kind of property has most of those attributes, including permenant ownership and total control.
In other words, personal property is the lay person's prototype when thinking about property of any kind, and "intellectual property" has been used to shift the ground of the debate by inducing assumptions about the nature of a copyright.
Agreed.
And many web applications that implement some sort of stateful behavior *still* break in weird and wonderful ways when a user backs up. Developers tend to dismiss "back" as something users shouldn't do...
Yea, but the problem with History (after browsing through 80 sites) is that you have to know the name of the host with the content you're interested in. Was that interesting news item on Windows on bugtraq.com, securityfocus.com, zdnet.com, news.com, register.com, ...
Without context or clues, you have to search through a lot of history, remember or write down URLs, or give up...
Yes, but you were working at a company with a high clued-to-clueless ratio among the users, a relatively atypical user population. For example, most BMC employees (excluding management) who fill up their hard drives will recognize the problem and self-help; much fewer employees at an insurance firm would do so. Also, BMC Software is a company that specializes in IT service products (albeit much of it for mainframes and servers), so it's unsurprising that: a) they have top people in IT themselves b) they're IT infrastructure is compentently set up