It's an obvious trademark violation, I'd say. And if it is, they could have sued him immediately instead of sending a notice, so I'd say he was lucky.
Yeah, he was kind of an idiot to refer to the main character as "Pac-man" in his descriptions of the game for example on the website:
Super Pac V1.05 released - Increased speed of Pacman
even if there is no copyright violation, "Pacman" and "Pac-man" are obviously trademarked, so you're not supposed to use them to refer to your product or part of your product. Even if there is no copyright violation, the trademark violation is clear as day.
Having actually studied copyright law, I have to say it's not so clear as you make it out to be.
It's a copyright violation because he hasn't simply copied the game concept, but has largely copied the art and the name too.
See, now here is an interesting question. How close does a copy have to be to be a copy?
It would be allowed for example to create a Pacman clone, make the Pacman character green, maybe give him some red eyes or something, replace the power pills with energy drinks and replace the ghosts with aliens, then call the game "Green Gobbler" or whatever- this wouldn't be a copyright violation, but to outright copy what pacman is and is about- a yellow circle with a mouth chasing ghosts and then also putting Pac in the name absolutely is a blatant copyright violation.
That's questionable and I think in court you would have a jury question. Is "what pacman is and is about" really about what color he is? Maybe what pacman is about is a circle with a wedge-shaped mouth that eats dots, regardless of color? Maybe what pacman is about is something that dodges ghosts and eats small things in a maze, regardless of what those things are? (not to mention, the name ("Green Gobbler" vs. "Super-pac") is completely irrelevant to a copyright claim because that's a trademark issue)
I speak from experience having research it extensively before after having been in precisely this situation. Many many years ago, I worked on a clone of Teamfortress and after Valve aquired it and the IP they requested a shutdown of our mod- they had every right to do this because we hadn't simply copied the Fortress section of the name, but we had copied the class names and so forth too even though the artwork was original- we had copied the fundamental IP.
Well, you had copied text from the original product. That's what the class names are. I don't know how "fundamental" that is if the primary value of the product is the gameplay, though.
We could get round this by simply changing some class names, and changing the mod name to remove Fortress, this was enough to satisfy Valve themselves even, but the fundamental point is if you're going to copy not just the concept, but the fundamental IP as well (i.e. characters, story, that sort of thing) then yes, it absolutely is a copyright violation.
"story" is typically not held to be the fundamental IP protected by copyright. Copyright protects specific images and sequences of words, not the underlying ideas behind them. You can publish an identical story written using completely different words and potentially not be in violation of copyright. In your example, it doesn't sound like you really changed much at all, like characters or story; you just changed the words attached to certain things. How is that different from changing one yellow circle to a different yellow circle?
You may not think it should be a copyright violation, but you're completely wrong to suggest that it is not.
Again, I think the issues are more complicated than you think they are.
This is why people usually put IANAL in there post (IANAL btw!) because they know full well they're simply stating what they think may be true, but which possibly is not.
Yeah, you might want to take your own advice.
Your advice is dangerous because you're telling him to fight against legal notice which he almost certainly has no chance of succeeding with and if he does take it all the way to court, it would probably destroy him as he really does not have a leg to stand on.
I think he does have a leg to stand on. Remember when Apple sued Microsoft for copying the "look and feel" of Mac OS into MS Windows?? The judge said "look and feel" was not copyrightable and threw the whole thing out. If the
"However, copying the "look and feel" of a game using different code and different art, is not copyright infringement."
No, this is completely wrong. If you copy the characters- i.e. Pacman, then it IS copyright infringement, that is Namco's IP.
What part of "different art" don't you understand?
What you're thinking of is gameplay- that's something you can copy.
Yeah, that's the feel part of "look and feel".
You absolutely can create a game where you go round a maze collecting things whilst being chased by enemies, that's no problem, but copying the fundamental IP such as the characters or the storyline is a problem. That's why this is copyright infringement.
So anything that's IP is necessarily copyright? Where did you study law???
Why isn't it a copyright violation. He used their characters, their name (SuperPacman came out in 1982), and mechanic. This about as much of a derivative work as you get.
It's not a copyright violation to copy things that copyrights don't cover. Copyrights don't cover the characters. Fan fiction is perfectly legal, for example. Copyrights don't cover the name (that's a trademark matter). Copyrights certainly don't cover the mechanic. You can make a game that plays *identically* if all the graphics, text, and sounds are original, and no code is copied. It's not about how derivative it is, it's about whether the things it allegedly copies are even under copyright.
What exactly is Wikileaks doing that all these other media organizations aren't also doing?
They provide a secure anonymous drop-box so that people can leak to them without leaving a trail by which to get caught. (It's important to note that Bradley Manning got caught because he went around bragging to others about leaking; WikiLeaks didn't blow his cover, he did that himself)
No one gave Wikileaks a security clearance; they are incapable of leaking anything. They are merely publishing information that was leaked by someone else.
They don't leak, but they do facilitate leaks. By providing the secure setup they presumably encourage leaks that would not otherwise occur, and distribute material that might be containable by the authorities if the leakers had gone to a more traditional outlet.
So how are all these attacks on Wikileaks' right to publish justified vs. those of the NY Times or the Associated Press?
Simply put, the attacks aren't justified, but people in the press and government are self-righteous assholes.
Good to know. Being someone who doesn't understand graphics and probably never will, I just assumed it would replace all of X because that's what the original announcement seemed to say.
I want to, so bad...but the servers I admin are all in a lab with defense contracts. And I really don't want my boss to lose his job. So it would be a bad idea. Makes me wish I'd kept my home server around though.
Considering there are torrents out there several hundred gigabytes in size, I'd say that a torrent is definitely feasible. If they're worried about leaking too much too quickly, they should encrypt it with a 2048 character encryption key so nobody can access it until they say so (or better yet, have a few torrents encrypted separately). Then if they get pulled, it wouldn't take much to get a pastebin put up somewhere with the decryption key(s).
Swiss DNS appears to have shut off wikileaks domain now as well, or else to be under attack. Try these (no knowing how long they'll stay up, but as I post this they're still available): #1 #2
ok, maybe they wouldn't shut em down. but I don't doubt for a second there are people in the government who would shut down wikileaks. and for anyone who continued to support wikileaks, life would become very difficult.
Sure, but that doesn't mean they have the power to. There are probably people in government who want me shot, and I thank God we have due process, rule of law, and a (sort of) free press to stop that from happening.
My main point still stands. Government pressured Amazon, and the government could make up any reason they wanted to put even more weight on them.
What's remarkable is not that government tried to pressure businesses to isolate wikileaks, which we all expected them to do anyway. What's remarkable is how easily businesses are capitulating, without putting up any fight whatsoever.
up to and including shutting them down. maybe it didn't come to that yet but by god it very well could if they continued.
The government doesn't have that authority. If they did, they would already have shut down The New York Times for publishing the wikileaks documents, not to mention for their 1971 publication of excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, and would have shut down the Unitarian Universalist Association for publishing the Pentagon Papers as well. None of these have been shut down.
I would submit that the problem isn't, as you suggest, that government is overbearing on businesses. It's that government and big business are in bed together, in a mutually beneficial arrangement, which makes it too easy for either to influence the other with little to no resistance.
Why is it in your world, you're the only one enlightened to the difference while everyone else is completely oblivious?
You're the ONLY one in this exchange who has accused someone of not knowing the difference. I don't consider myself enlightened and haven't acted like I am. I'm just trying to have a discussion of sexism, its effects, and how to fix it. That's all.
As many people have stated, you're not improving society - you're just making society less tolerant in your own way, which doesn't actually fare better in the long run than allowing people to make bad jokes.
I am in favor of allowing people to make bad jokes. The fact that you're posing my actions as the opposite of "allowing people to make bad jokes" when "allowing people to make bad jokes" is EXACTLY WHAT I AM ADVOCATING shows that you're not really applying logic to this discussion, you're just sticking to your pre-conceived notions and rationalizing them. Which is certainly your right, but it shoots to hell any claims you make that others are making society less tolerant, especially the very people whose engagement in this thread is entirely an effort to loosen pre-conceived notions on all sides.
AAAAND you're lying about what your evidence is, too. The article you linked says that they were contacted and urged. Governments contact businesses and urge them to do things all the time. That's not a threat to shut them down. Most of the time the businesses don't listen and just go about their business. My challenge still stands: present one shred of evidence of an actual threat to shut down either Amazon or PayPal. I'm betting you won't find one because no such threat was ever made.
Pretty much every article I read on electronic trash from the English speaking world refers to it as e-Waste,
Unless the articles you've read include every article ever written on the subject, this isn't really relevant to the articles I've read which were the topic at issue.
so if you truly haven't seen the term then you probably shouldn't be posting on the subject, because it's fucking impossible to avoid if you're paying the least bit of attention.
Or maybe I've been paying attention but the world is bigger than one person's individual experience, and in some places they don't use the same terminology?
"Oh, I've never heard that, so it must be false, it can't possibly be that I have been hiding under a rock. I can't be crazy, it has to be everyone else."
You're the only person in this thread who's using that sort of reasoning. Most importantly, I never said anything was false simply because I hadn't heard it; I said your statements about my city's waste disposal practices were false based on my direct experience to the contrary, which I believe I'm in a better position to speak on than you. On the other matters, my reasoning was of the form, "Oh, I haven't heard that, would you please explain?" Your reasoning was of the form, "I have never heard of discussion of this issue which didn't use this terminology, therefore such discussion doesn't exist." I'm sorry you have a complex which causes you to believe your limited experience automatically describes everything in the entire world, but that's really not my problem. The fact that many other posters expressed confusion about the summary shows that clearly what you regard as universal knowledge isn't as universal as you think it is.
To all those who are saying, "Don't blame PayPal and Amazon, because they are responding to government pressure! It's the big bad government that's to blame, not friendly American businesses!" (and there are several of these in the above threads) I would just like to point out that your government/business dichotomy doesn't actually exist in the real world. While I'm sure some in the government have approached these companies, I'd be willing to bet my life the decisions were made for independent business reasons, because the large corporations know which side their bread is buttered on, and it's the side of a large and powerful US government.
Do you really believe the shareholders of PayPal and Amazon don't see a strong US government as profitable to them? Most of these shareholders own stock in many other corporations, probably including corporations who benefited from government giveaways in Iraq and Afghanistan, from hundreds of other government contracts, from bank bailouts, or from the auto bailout. Notably, anyone who owns stock in companies engaged in war profiteering suffers from both the diplomatic cable leaks and the military leaks because they need the government to have a free hand in matters of war and peace in order to make the decisions that most profit them.
In this country, large corporations and government are on the same side. They have been for decades. They work together to screw us. Think about it: who do politicians most closely listen to? Lobbyists. Who has most of the lobbyists? Big corporations. The only time government and big corporations are NOT on the same side is when we, the people, really push our government to do something different, and at that point government sometimes does something somewhat beneficial while corporations fight it and claim the government is "anti-business". The truth is, the government is never anti-business except when businesses are doing something really wrong and the people stand up to vocally oppose them.
After all, how could an entity controlled by business be anti-business?
You, as a private citizen, are free to stop doing business with anyone whom you so choose simply because you don't like them.
But when Heart of Atlanta Motel, as a private business, stops doing business with someone they choose because they don't like the color of their skin, you threaten to 'report them to the US government?' On what possible basis? Are you actually suggesting that the government should force Heart of Atlanta Motel or any other private business to continue doing business against their will?
In any case, no, it does not necessarily follow that businesses should have some right just because people do. Why would they? Businesses aren't people. An obvious example is the right to vote.
Wiki-leaks is NOT THE PRESS! They don't operate within the ethical guidelines or standards of the press. Blanket revelations of mass quantities of classified information is not journalism...
"The Press" in the words of the 1st amendment refer to the printing press, not to an organization or industry. The re-definition of "The Press" to mean the collection of professional journalists came later. I assure you when the founders wrote "freedom...of the press" into the Constitution they were not trying to single out a group of people for extra freedoms.
If the government threatened to shut down your business because you were supporting Wikileaks, you would probably cave too.
All right, genius, show us even one shred of evidence that the government threatened to shut down either Amazon or Paypal.
The real issue here, as always, is government pressure and the power of the state.
I'd say the real issue here is someone's addiction to a rosy-eyed view of corporations who can do no wrong blinds him to what's plainly right in front of him.
I just wanted to let you know this is by far the most insightful commentary I have seen on the topic, and the most insightful post I've seen on/. in multiple weeks.
Wikileaks, which is revealing the truth about governments and therefore aiding (in a way) the democratic process - is being killed off because it is risky for companies to continue supporting it....
Yes, but we've always known that corporations hate Democracy. It's not as profitable as faux-Democracy.
Well the domain name is the only thing apparently under US jurisdiction.
And the domain name was the only thing that was seized. Where's the problem?
At the end of the day this is a stretch to having US law control the internet by allowing US judges to issue take down notices for things outside there jurisdiction.
We've already established that US law doesn't control the internet, only the US-allocated domains. The sites are presumably still up, accessible by IP address, and are presumably eligible to go get a.cx or.se or.ch domain.
The root issue was the stupid idea of.com etc as apposed to.co.uk and similar. This moves exposes how important it is to move the dns root to the control of an international agency like the UN.
Well, people who don't like the policies and jurisdictions surrounding.com are free to apply for.co.uk domains (or whatever) instead. Given that the vast majority of traffic these days goes through hyperlinks rather than people manually typing in addresses to their browsers, there's not really a reason you can't get equal traffic with basically any TLD. Yeah, it probably would have made more sense if.org,.com,.net had been internationally administered from the beginning, but given the system is set up as it is there was no over-reach in authority in seizing the domains.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an obvious trademark violation, I'd say. And if it is, they could have sued him immediately instead of sending a notice, so I'd say he was lucky.
Yeah, he was kind of an idiot to refer to the main character as "Pac-man" in his descriptions of the game for example on the website:
Super Pac V1.05 released - Increased speed of Pacman
even if there is no copyright violation, "Pacman" and "Pac-man" are obviously trademarked, so you're not supposed to use them to refer to your product or part of your product. Even if there is no copyright violation, the trademark violation is clear as day.
Yes it is a copyright violation.
Having actually studied copyright law, I have to say it's not so clear as you make it out to be.
It's a copyright violation because he hasn't simply copied the game concept, but has largely copied the art and the name too.
See, now here is an interesting question. How close does a copy have to be to be a copy?
It would be allowed for example to create a Pacman clone, make the Pacman character green, maybe give him some red eyes or something, replace the power pills with energy drinks and replace the ghosts with aliens, then call the game "Green Gobbler" or whatever- this wouldn't be a copyright violation, but to outright copy what pacman is and is about- a yellow circle with a mouth chasing ghosts and then also putting Pac in the name absolutely is a blatant copyright violation.
That's questionable and I think in court you would have a jury question. Is "what pacman is and is about" really about what color he is? Maybe what pacman is about is a circle with a wedge-shaped mouth that eats dots, regardless of color? Maybe what pacman is about is something that dodges ghosts and eats small things in a maze, regardless of what those things are? (not to mention, the name ("Green Gobbler" vs. "Super-pac") is completely irrelevant to a copyright claim because that's a trademark issue)
I speak from experience having research it extensively before after having been in precisely this situation. Many many years ago, I worked on a clone of Teamfortress and after Valve aquired it and the IP they requested a shutdown of our mod- they had every right to do this because we hadn't simply copied the Fortress section of the name, but we had copied the class names and so forth too even though the artwork was original- we had copied the fundamental IP.
Well, you had copied text from the original product. That's what the class names are. I don't know how "fundamental" that is if the primary value of the product is the gameplay, though.
We could get round this by simply changing some class names, and changing the mod name to remove Fortress, this was enough to satisfy Valve themselves even, but the fundamental point is if you're going to copy not just the concept, but the fundamental IP as well (i.e. characters, story, that sort of thing) then yes, it absolutely is a copyright violation.
"story" is typically not held to be the fundamental IP protected by copyright. Copyright protects specific images and sequences of words, not the underlying ideas behind them. You can publish an identical story written using completely different words and potentially not be in violation of copyright. In your example, it doesn't sound like you really changed much at all, like characters or story; you just changed the words attached to certain things. How is that different from changing one yellow circle to a different yellow circle?
You may not think it should be a copyright violation, but you're completely wrong to suggest that it is not.
Again, I think the issues are more complicated than you think they are.
This is why people usually put IANAL in there post (IANAL btw!) because they know full well they're simply stating what they think may be true, but which possibly is not.
Yeah, you might want to take your own advice.
Your advice is dangerous because you're telling him to fight against legal notice which he almost certainly has no chance of succeeding with and if he does take it all the way to court, it would probably destroy him as he really does not have a leg to stand on.
I think he does have a leg to stand on. Remember when Apple sued Microsoft for copying the "look and feel" of Mac OS into MS Windows?? The judge said "look and feel" was not copyrightable and threw the whole thing out. If the
"However, copying the "look and feel" of a game using different code and different art, is not copyright infringement."
No, this is completely wrong. If you copy the characters- i.e. Pacman, then it IS copyright infringement, that is Namco's IP.
What part of "different art" don't you understand?
What you're thinking of is gameplay- that's something you can copy.
Yeah, that's the feel part of "look and feel".
You absolutely can create a game where you go round a maze collecting things whilst being chased by enemies, that's no problem, but copying the fundamental IP such as the characters or the storyline is a problem. That's why this is copyright infringement.
So anything that's IP is necessarily copyright? Where did you study law???
Why isn't it a copyright violation. He used their characters, their name (SuperPacman came out in 1982), and mechanic. This about as much of a derivative work as you get.
It's not a copyright violation to copy things that copyrights don't cover. Copyrights don't cover the characters. Fan fiction is perfectly legal, for example. Copyrights don't cover the name (that's a trademark matter). Copyrights certainly don't cover the mechanic. You can make a game that plays *identically* if all the graphics, text, and sounds are original, and no code is copied. It's not about how derivative it is, it's about whether the things it allegedly copies are even under copyright.
What exactly is Wikileaks doing that all these other media organizations aren't also doing?
They provide a secure anonymous drop-box so that people can leak to them without leaving a trail by which to get caught. (It's important to note that Bradley Manning got caught because he went around bragging to others about leaking; WikiLeaks didn't blow his cover, he did that himself)
No one gave Wikileaks a security clearance; they are incapable of leaking anything. They are merely publishing information that was leaked by someone else.
They don't leak, but they do facilitate leaks. By providing the secure setup they presumably encourage leaks that would not otherwise occur, and distribute material that might be containable by the authorities if the leakers had gone to a more traditional outlet.
So how are all these attacks on Wikileaks' right to publish justified vs. those of the NY Times or the Associated Press?
Simply put, the attacks aren't justified, but people in the press and government are self-righteous assholes.
Good to know. Being someone who doesn't understand graphics and probably never will, I just assumed it would replace all of X because that's what the original announcement seemed to say.
I want to, so bad...but the servers I admin are all in a lab with defense contracts. And I really don't want my boss to lose his job. So it would be a bad idea. Makes me wish I'd kept my home server around though.
Considering there are torrents out there several hundred gigabytes in size, I'd say that a torrent is definitely feasible. If they're worried about leaking too much too quickly, they should encrypt it with a 2048 character encryption key so nobody can access it until they say so (or better yet, have a few torrents encrypted separately). Then if they get pulled, it wouldn't take much to get a pastebin put up somewhere with the decryption key(s).
Apparently they have already done this.
http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/05/09BEIJING1336.html http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/07/09BEIJING1957.html
Swiss DNS appears to have shut off wikileaks domain now as well, or else to be under attack. Try these (no knowing how long they'll stay up, but as I post this they're still available):
#1
#2
Sorry, but if the Chinese think the internet is controllable, it is because the US is showing them how to.
Well, to be fair, China has been doing all those things for years, whereas the US just started most of them.
ok, maybe they wouldn't shut em down. but I don't doubt for a second there are people in the government who would shut down wikileaks. and for anyone who continued to support wikileaks, life would become very difficult.
Sure, but that doesn't mean they have the power to. There are probably people in government who want me shot, and I thank God we have due process, rule of law, and a (sort of) free press to stop that from happening.
My main point still stands. Government pressured Amazon, and the government could make up any reason they wanted to put even more weight on them.
What's remarkable is not that government tried to pressure businesses to isolate wikileaks, which we all expected them to do anyway. What's remarkable is how easily businesses are capitulating, without putting up any fight whatsoever.
up to and including shutting them down. maybe it didn't come to that yet but by god it very well could if they continued.
The government doesn't have that authority. If they did, they would already have shut down The New York Times for publishing the wikileaks documents, not to mention for their 1971 publication of excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, and would have shut down the Unitarian Universalist Association for publishing the Pentagon Papers as well. None of these have been shut down.
I would submit that the problem isn't, as you suggest, that government is overbearing on businesses. It's that government and big business are in bed together, in a mutually beneficial arrangement, which makes it too easy for either to influence the other with little to no resistance.
Why is it in your world, you're the only one enlightened to the difference while everyone else is completely oblivious?
You're the ONLY one in this exchange who has accused someone of not knowing the difference. I don't consider myself enlightened and haven't acted like I am. I'm just trying to have a discussion of sexism, its effects, and how to fix it. That's all.
As many people have stated, you're not improving society - you're just making society less tolerant in your own way, which doesn't actually fare better in the long run than allowing people to make bad jokes.
I am in favor of allowing people to make bad jokes. The fact that you're posing my actions as the opposite of "allowing people to make bad jokes" when "allowing people to make bad jokes" is EXACTLY WHAT I AM ADVOCATING shows that you're not really applying logic to this discussion, you're just sticking to your pre-conceived notions and rationalizing them. Which is certainly your right, but it shoots to hell any claims you make that others are making society less tolerant, especially the very people whose engagement in this thread is entirely an effort to loosen pre-conceived notions on all sides.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/01/lieberman/index.html
AAAAND you're lying about what your evidence is, too. The article you linked says that they were contacted and urged. Governments contact businesses and urge them to do things all the time. That's not a threat to shut them down. Most of the time the businesses don't listen and just go about their business. My challenge still stands: present one shred of evidence of an actual threat to shut down either Amazon or PayPal. I'm betting you won't find one because no such threat was ever made.
I said the issue HERE is government power. IN THIS CASE.
Wow, now you're directly lying about what you just said. Bravo.
To quote you:
The real issue here, as always, is government pressure and the power of the state.
What part of "AS ALWAYS" means "IN THIS CASE"?
Pretty much every article I read on electronic trash from the English speaking world refers to it as e-Waste,
Unless the articles you've read include every article ever written on the subject, this isn't really relevant to the articles I've read which were the topic at issue.
so if you truly haven't seen the term then you probably shouldn't be posting on the subject, because it's fucking impossible to avoid if you're paying the least bit of attention.
Or maybe I've been paying attention but the world is bigger than one person's individual experience, and in some places they don't use the same terminology?
"Oh, I've never heard that, so it must be false, it can't possibly be that I have been hiding under a rock. I can't be crazy, it has to be everyone else."
You're the only person in this thread who's using that sort of reasoning. Most importantly, I never said anything was false simply because I hadn't heard it; I said your statements about my city's waste disposal practices were false based on my direct experience to the contrary, which I believe I'm in a better position to speak on than you. On the other matters, my reasoning was of the form, "Oh, I haven't heard that, would you please explain?" Your reasoning was of the form, "I have never heard of discussion of this issue which didn't use this terminology, therefore such discussion doesn't exist." I'm sorry you have a complex which causes you to believe your limited experience automatically describes everything in the entire world, but that's really not my problem. The fact that many other posters expressed confusion about the summary shows that clearly what you regard as universal knowledge isn't as universal as you think it is.
To all those who are saying, "Don't blame PayPal and Amazon, because they are responding to government pressure! It's the big bad government that's to blame, not friendly American businesses!" (and there are several of these in the above threads) I would just like to point out that your government/business dichotomy doesn't actually exist in the real world. While I'm sure some in the government have approached these companies, I'd be willing to bet my life the decisions were made for independent business reasons, because the large corporations know which side their bread is buttered on, and it's the side of a large and powerful US government.
Do you really believe the shareholders of PayPal and Amazon don't see a strong US government as profitable to them? Most of these shareholders own stock in many other corporations, probably including corporations who benefited from government giveaways in Iraq and Afghanistan, from hundreds of other government contracts, from bank bailouts, or from the auto bailout. Notably, anyone who owns stock in companies engaged in war profiteering suffers from both the diplomatic cable leaks and the military leaks because they need the government to have a free hand in matters of war and peace in order to make the decisions that most profit them.
In this country, large corporations and government are on the same side. They have been for decades. They work together to screw us. Think about it: who do politicians most closely listen to? Lobbyists. Who has most of the lobbyists? Big corporations. The only time government and big corporations are NOT on the same side is when we, the people, really push our government to do something different, and at that point government sometimes does something somewhat beneficial while corporations fight it and claim the government is "anti-business". The truth is, the government is never anti-business except when businesses are doing something really wrong and the people stand up to vocally oppose them.
After all, how could an entity controlled by business be anti-business?
So let me get this straight:
You, as a private citizen, are free to stop doing business with anyone whom you so choose simply because you don't like them.
But when Heart of Atlanta Motel, as a private business, stops doing business with someone they choose because they don't like the color of their skin, you threaten to 'report them to the US government?' On what possible basis? Are you actually suggesting that the government should force Heart of Atlanta Motel or any other private business to continue doing business against their will?
There, fixed that for you.
In any case, no, it does not necessarily follow that businesses should have some right just because people do. Why would they? Businesses aren't people. An obvious example is the right to vote.
The Supreme Court of the US is working on that.
Wonder what the Chinese are making of all this. They seen the romans rice and fall...
No, no, no. The Chinese had all the rice. It was the Romans' wheat, man, the Romans' wheat!
Wiki-leaks is NOT THE PRESS! They don't operate within the ethical guidelines or standards of the press. Blanket revelations of mass quantities of classified information is not journalism...
"The Press" in the words of the 1st amendment refer to the printing press, not to an organization or industry. The re-definition of "The Press" to mean the collection of professional journalists came later. I assure you when the founders wrote "freedom...of the press" into the Constitution they were not trying to single out a group of people for extra freedoms.
So in other words, you were a supporter until he did something you didn't like, and now you hate him. What is this, middle school? Grow up already.
If the government threatened to shut down your business because you were supporting Wikileaks, you would probably cave too.
All right, genius, show us even one shred of evidence that the government threatened to shut down either Amazon or Paypal.
The real issue here, as always, is government pressure and the power of the state.
I'd say the real issue here is someone's addiction to a rosy-eyed view of corporations who can do no wrong blinds him to what's plainly right in front of him.
I just wanted to let you know this is by far the most insightful commentary I have seen on the topic, and the most insightful post I've seen on /. in multiple weeks.
Wikileaks, which is revealing the truth about governments and therefore aiding (in a way) the democratic process - is being killed off because it is risky for companies to continue supporting it....
Yes, but we've always known that corporations hate Democracy. It's not as profitable as faux-Democracy.
Well the domain name is the only thing apparently under US jurisdiction.
And the domain name was the only thing that was seized. Where's the problem?
At the end of the day this is a stretch to having US law control the internet by allowing US judges to issue take down notices for things outside there jurisdiction.
We've already established that US law doesn't control the internet, only the US-allocated domains. The sites are presumably still up, accessible by IP address, and are presumably eligible to go get a .cx or .se or .ch domain.
The root issue was the stupid idea of .com etc as apposed to .co.uk and similar. This moves exposes how important it is to move the dns root to the control of an international agency like the UN.
Well, people who don't like the policies and jurisdictions surrounding .com are free to apply for .co.uk domains (or whatever) instead. Given that the vast majority of traffic these days goes through hyperlinks rather than people manually typing in addresses to their browsers, there's not really a reason you can't get equal traffic with basically any TLD. Yeah, it probably would have made more sense if .org, .com, .net had been internationally administered from the beginning, but given the system is set up as it is there was no over-reach in authority in seizing the domains.