Whether or not fair use is a "right" is irrelevant. Fair use is explicitly spelled out in Title 17, section 107 as a "limitation on exclusive rights." Not only is it irrelevant whether or not fair use is a right, it is explicity, statutory law that the rights given to copyright holders are limited by fair use. The law is nearly the exact opposite what these thieves are claiming.
I don't know why people are so resistent to simply registering a copyright. It's a simple form, costs less than $50, and a stamp. End of story. And you can't enforce a copyright in court without registering it first, nor is the court interested in anything but the registration as proof. And if you're not willing to enforce it in court, it doesn't matter what you are willing to do, because you can't enforce it.
Patents are considerably more complicated, of course, and more expensive, but again, the only thing the court will care about is the patent.
Does anybody have a patent on reinventing the wheel yet?
Why does this keep coming up, again and again, on nearly every site that lest you upload anything? It's not all that complicated to figure out:
Lawyer with little computer expertise learns that uploaded (and copyrighted) stuff is being reproduced and set out, as the user intended, and thinks (and not entirely without cause) "There are copyright implications to that, because we are, technically, making copies of copyrighted material." He writes a FUD memo to management, who read the subject line with glazed eyes (because it's from a lawyer, and therefore, too complicated for them to understand," and they respond with "What do we need to do?" Lawyer, who has no experience whatsoever at dealing with the general public on the internet, writes a TOS that covers this concerns. Management, who have almost as little experience at dealing with the public (rather than shareholders), rubber stamps is.
These things are intended to cover the Google's (or whoever's) ass for doing what they say they're going to do, and what their users tell them to do: store this stuff and offer it up to the web surfing world under the conditions you said you would.
And a quick perusal of Title 17 shows that copyrights cannot be transferred accidentally anyway. If Google (or whoever) tried to use a clause like that to claim they now owned someone else's work for any purpose other than what was intended by the copyright holder, they'd get their faces blown off by any competent lawyer. Such a clause would be found to be unconscionable, and would not meet the requirements for a copyright transfer even if it weren't.
This is nothing new, and no different than any other "OMFG! THIS TOS IS EVIL" story in the last ten years.
There's nothing moral about murder. Or advocating it. If you don't like living in a country governed by the rule of law, I will buy you a one-way ticket to any other country in the world, so long as you for formally forfeit your US citizenship to ensure you can never come back. Seriously.
Your loaded language makes it clear that you are, by your nature, a criminal, whether you've ever had the balls to act on your violent impulses or not.
And rights are hardly relevant when the SWAT team shoots you in the head. If you shoot at a cop serving a legal seizure warrant, you are going to die.
And, for the record, you seem to be saying that the RIAA should start a violent revolution rather than pay a legal judgement against them, for less than their mid-level managers make in a year. Is that correct?
You really should do some research on how this sort of thing works. If you have a judgment against someone who has the assets, it is generally a very simple process to force collection. In California, you subpoena appropriate employees of the company in to court to answer questions - somebody like the CFO, to answer questions like "Where are you bank accounts" and "What is the account number and current balance" and "What is the license plate number and VIN of every car owned by the RIAA and issued to employees to use." Then you just pick what you're going to have uniformed Marshall's deputies go out and seize, at gunpoint if necessary, to sell off. Banks are very cooperative about taking money out of a bank account.
And if they ignore the subpoena, judges tend to do things like issue arrest warrants, eventually.
Anybody who fails to collect on a judgement against someone who actually has the wealth has no one to blame but themselves.
Hell, even $cientology was forced, on pain of prison time for higher-ups, to pay a judgement.
A friend of mine was driven out of the Marine Corps (quite a few years ago) for being overweight, due to the retarded use of actuarial tables. His BMI would have been 32, at 5' 6" and around 200 lbs. But he was simply massively muscled. At the time, his body fat was at less than 5% (directly measured by doctors who were trying to keep him from dying from too little body fat. He was required to do physical training several times a day and run several miles.
They want employees to be fit and trim, because being overweight is unhealthy. Clearly, they acknowledge that being overweight is a medical disability. And they're going to dock their employee's pay over what they acknowledge is a medical disability.
Aside from the obvious Americans with Disabilities Act violations, in most states, docking pay for an illegal purpose is criminal, and rightly so. Whoever signed off on this belongs in prison.
The entire idea of insurance is to spread out the costs over a large number of people, so that those who need medical care can afford it, with help from those who don't. The idea of changing insurance options based on medical need is in conflict with the entire purpose of insurance. Insurance companies have arrived at the point where they literally expect money, as a tax, collected at gunpoint in necessary, in exchange for nothing in return. And they've screwed up the medical industry to the point where even those who don't need much medical care can't afford any without insurance. It's taken them a century to do it, but they've made insurance just another tax.
It's time for some reform. Maybe some old fashioned "water the tree of liberty" kind of reform.
"Men also have a universal preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio."
"Universal preference" means that all men have such a preference. This is obviously untrue, on an individual and societal level. There are cultures where food is never abundant where women that westerners would consider fat are the most desirable. And I know several men (including in my own family) who have always preferred large women.
At best, they're claiming that vague trends are universal truths. That's a sure sign of a bullshit artist at work.
There is an extensive body of statutory and case law regarding credit reporting bureaus. The short story is, if they misreport things about you, you can demand they fix it. If they don't, you can sue them.
The long story is called the "Fair Credit Reporting Act." Google is your friend.
Were they interested in the fact that it was a stolen credit card, or were they looking for a mugger or burglar?
In California, using a stolen credit card for a small amount is a misdemeanor, which means the police can't arrest you unless they personally see you commit the crime. But if you mug someone to get it, that's a felony robbery, and a violent one, to boot.
They really don't care about small-time economic crime. They don't have time to.
Considering that most police agencies (including the FBI) flately refuse to even take a report over less than $50,000, color me a little skeptical about how "serious" these guys are.
(And yes, I've worked in retail management, and above, for all my adult life, and have been directly involved in retreiving those records. A couple of times. In 25 years. The local cops will occasionally have time for such fraud, but they're generally only interested in the shoplifting aspects of it, because it's a far lower amount to qualify for a felony charge that way.)
This will have very little practical effect. Manufacturers who want to set minimum retail prices have always had tools that have the same end result. The most used one is MAP - Minimum Advertised Price. Which is to say, "You can sell our stuff for any price you choose. BUT, if you meet our MAP, we will contribute $x,xxx (where x = most of the cost of an an campaign) towards your advertising costs. If you sell below our MAP, we contribute nothing at all."
This is been standard business practice for decades.
This won't hurt small retailers, who generally have too much overhead (as a percentage of their total revenue) to do much discounting. It won't hurt large retailers, who generally have enough buying power to negotiate whatever deal they want (Walmart: Let us sell stuff for whatever price we want, or we'll carry your competitor's products, and you'll lose 50% of your total business immediately.) The only retailers this will hurt are discounters who are smaller than their suppliers, and thus, not important enough to negotiate special deals.
By the time you're 30 and haven't started, most institutions won't extend you any anymore.
That's just not true. And I know it's not true, because I've been there. When I got my first car loan (over the age of 30), my credit history was, literally, a blank piece of letterhead. The best way to establish a credit history is to buy a car, because if you put 50% down, *anybody* can be financed for the rest (provided they have sufficient income to make the payments), and car payments seem to be just about the best thing you can do for your credit rating (as in, making them all, on time).
When this clown decides to join the civilized world, and he will, he'll have to go through the motions, but it's not that difficult if you're not in a hurry.
I've had a merchant account for about a decade, and worked in retail management for two and a half. Argue semantics all you want, I know what the agreements say.
Again, I prefer to avoid doing business with companies that can't keep their promises.
http://www.creditinfocenter.com/cards/crcd_buy.sht ml, is simply wrong (or at least 15 years out of date) on at least one point. It is illegal to require a phone number on a credit card purchase. It's illegal to even have a box labeled "phone number" on the charge slip. This is federal law, and has been for at least 15 years. (They're also badly out of date on credit card numbers written on checks, and on mail order regulations.) So I find that source less than credible. I find you less than credible, as well.
The next thing that they should go after is the concept that you don't actually *own* software that you purchase, you only "license" it.
Adobe v. Softman is old news, and addressed exactly that, and was ruled in the correct way. In California, at least, if you A) pay a set amount, and B) get indefinite use of the software for that payment, it's a Sale of Goods, and the Right of First Sale (under Title 17) applies. That ruling is at least four or five years old now.
This is why Microsoft is so desperate to get Windows and Office transferred over to a "pay per month or we turn it off" model.
Discounts for cash vs credit card are a violation of the merchant's agreement with the credit card company. I prefer not doing business with retailers who can't keep their written promises.
If he paid for the computer by credit card, he should have challenged the transaction on the basis of a defective product the company refused to make good on. It's a simple process, and the law favors him. Especially if he as a UPS receipt proving he shipped it back to them.
If he didn't pay with a credit card, he's an idiot for that.
How the hell do you get a small claims suit moved to a superior court? There's certainly no argument that aritration will be cheaper, because small claims costs less than $50 to file, and lawyers are prohibited. Gateway has already spent a hundred times what the computer is worth. The superior court judge, at this point, should be talking about kicking the whole thing back down to small claims.
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He'll use it to claim he's been denied due process, because his subpoena wasn't honored, and demand everything be dropped as a result.
He'll fail. But he's used to that by now.
Whether or not fair use is a "right" is irrelevant. Fair use is explicitly spelled out in Title 17, section 107 as a "limitation on exclusive rights." Not only is it irrelevant whether or not fair use is a right, it is explicity, statutory law that the rights given to copyright holders are limited by fair use. The law is nearly the exact opposite what these thieves are claiming.
It obviously is a bad employee. Probably the CEO, who ordered his slaves to throw those peskey envelopes away.
I don't know why people are so resistent to simply registering a copyright. It's a simple form, costs less than $50, and a stamp. End of story. And you can't enforce a copyright in court without registering it first, nor is the court interested in anything but the registration as proof. And if you're not willing to enforce it in court, it doesn't matter what you are willing to do, because you can't enforce it.
Patents are considerably more complicated, of course, and more expensive, but again, the only thing the court will care about is the patent.
Does anybody have a patent on reinventing the wheel yet?
Why does this keep coming up, again and again, on nearly every site that lest you upload anything? It's not all that complicated to figure out:
Lawyer with little computer expertise learns that uploaded (and copyrighted) stuff is being reproduced and set out, as the user intended, and thinks (and not entirely without cause) "There are copyright implications to that, because we are, technically, making copies of copyrighted material." He writes a FUD memo to management, who read the subject line with glazed eyes (because it's from a lawyer, and therefore, too complicated for them to understand," and they respond with "What do we need to do?" Lawyer, who has no experience whatsoever at dealing with the general public on the internet, writes a TOS that covers this concerns. Management, who have almost as little experience at dealing with the public (rather than shareholders), rubber stamps is.
These things are intended to cover the Google's (or whoever's) ass for doing what they say they're going to do, and what their users tell them to do: store this stuff and offer it up to the web surfing world under the conditions you said you would.
And a quick perusal of Title 17 shows that copyrights cannot be transferred accidentally anyway. If Google (or whoever) tried to use a clause like that to claim they now owned someone else's work for any purpose other than what was intended by the copyright holder, they'd get their faces blown off by any competent lawyer. Such a clause would be found to be unconscionable, and would not meet the requirements for a copyright transfer even if it weren't.
This is nothing new, and no different than any other "OMFG! THIS TOS IS EVIL" story in the last ten years.
"... hopefully the two can ... compromise ... and not hurt the final product.'"
That they can even say this with a straight face is why movies suck.
There's nothing moral about murder. Or advocating it. If you don't like living in a country governed by the rule of law, I will buy you a one-way ticket to any other country in the world, so long as you for formally forfeit your US citizenship to ensure you can never come back. Seriously.
Your loaded language makes it clear that you are, by your nature, a criminal, whether you've ever had the balls to act on your violent impulses or not.
Have a nice life.
You only have the right to revolt if you win.
And rights are hardly relevant when the SWAT team shoots you in the head. If you shoot at a cop serving a legal seizure warrant, you are going to die.
And, for the record, you seem to be saying that the RIAA should start a violent revolution rather than pay a legal judgement against them, for less than their mid-level managers make in a year. Is that correct?
You really should do some research on how this sort of thing works. If you have a judgment against someone who has the assets, it is generally a very simple process to force collection. In California, you subpoena appropriate employees of the company in to court to answer questions - somebody like the CFO, to answer questions like "Where are you bank accounts" and "What is the account number and current balance" and "What is the license plate number and VIN of every car owned by the RIAA and issued to employees to use." Then you just pick what you're going to have uniformed Marshall's deputies go out and seize, at gunpoint if necessary, to sell off. Banks are very cooperative about taking money out of a bank account.
And if they ignore the subpoena, judges tend to do things like issue arrest warrants, eventually.
Anybody who fails to collect on a judgement against someone who actually has the wealth has no one to blame but themselves.
Hell, even $cientology was forced, on pain of prison time for higher-ups, to pay a judgement.
A friend of mine was driven out of the Marine Corps (quite a few years ago) for being overweight, due to the retarded use of actuarial tables. His BMI would have been 32, at 5' 6" and around 200 lbs. But he was simply massively muscled. At the time, his body fat was at less than 5% (directly measured by doctors who were trying to keep him from dying from too little body fat. He was required to do physical training several times a day and run several miles.
BMI isn't just crap, it's medically dangerous.
They want employees to be fit and trim, because being overweight is unhealthy. Clearly, they acknowledge that being overweight is a medical disability. And they're going to dock their employee's pay over what they acknowledge is a medical disability.
Aside from the obvious Americans with Disabilities Act violations, in most states, docking pay for an illegal purpose is criminal, and rightly so. Whoever signed off on this belongs in prison.
The entire idea of insurance is to spread out the costs over a large number of people, so that those who need medical care can afford it, with help from those who don't. The idea of changing insurance options based on medical need is in conflict with the entire purpose of insurance. Insurance companies have arrived at the point where they literally expect money, as a tax, collected at gunpoint in necessary, in exchange for nothing in return. And they've screwed up the medical industry to the point where even those who don't need much medical care can't afford any without insurance. It's taken them a century to do it, but they've made insurance just another tax.
It's time for some reform. Maybe some old fashioned "water the tree of liberty" kind of reform.
No wonder psychiatry is such a joke.
Might I trouble you for some examples?
"Men also have a universal preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio."
"Universal preference" means that all men have such a preference. This is obviously untrue, on an individual and societal level. There are cultures where food is never abundant where women that westerners would consider fat are the most desirable. And I know several men (including in my own family) who have always preferred large women.
At best, they're claiming that vague trends are universal truths. That's a sure sign of a bullshit artist at work.
Not regulated? You're joking, right? They're not as regulated as banks, but they are far more regulated than most businesses.
Go google on "Fair Credit Reporting Act."
If you don't know your rights, you don't have any. And don't deserve any.
There is an extensive body of statutory and case law regarding credit reporting bureaus. The short story is, if they misreport things about you, you can demand they fix it. If they don't, you can sue them.
The long story is called the "Fair Credit Reporting Act." Google is your friend.
Were they interested in the fact that it was a stolen credit card, or were they looking for a mugger or burglar?
In California, using a stolen credit card for a small amount is a misdemeanor, which means the police can't arrest you unless they personally see you commit the crime. But if you mug someone to get it, that's a felony robbery, and a violent one, to boot.
They really don't care about small-time economic crime. They don't have time to.
Considering that most police agencies (including the FBI) flately refuse to even take a report over less than $50,000, color me a little skeptical about how "serious" these guys are.
(And yes, I've worked in retail management, and above, for all my adult life, and have been directly involved in retreiving those records. A couple of times. In 25 years. The local cops will occasionally have time for such fraud, but they're generally only interested in the shoplifting aspects of it, because it's a far lower amount to qualify for a felony charge that way.)
This will have very little practical effect. Manufacturers who want to set minimum retail prices have always had tools that have the same end result. The most used one is MAP - Minimum Advertised Price. Which is to say, "You can sell our stuff for any price you choose. BUT, if you meet our MAP, we will contribute $x,xxx (where x = most of the cost of an an campaign) towards your advertising costs. If you sell below our MAP, we contribute nothing at all."
This is been standard business practice for decades.
This won't hurt small retailers, who generally have too much overhead (as a percentage of their total revenue) to do much discounting. It won't hurt large retailers, who generally have enough buying power to negotiate whatever deal they want (Walmart: Let us sell stuff for whatever price we want, or we'll carry your competitor's products, and you'll lose 50% of your total business immediately.) The only retailers this will hurt are discounters who are smaller than their suppliers, and thus, not important enough to negotiate special deals.
The Mythbusters school of aeronautical engineering?
By the time you're 30 and haven't started, most institutions won't extend you any anymore.
That's just not true. And I know it's not true, because I've been there. When I got my first car loan (over the age of 30), my credit history was, literally, a blank piece of letterhead. The best way to establish a credit history is to buy a car, because if you put 50% down, *anybody* can be financed for the rest (provided they have sufficient income to make the payments), and car payments seem to be just about the best thing you can do for your credit rating (as in, making them all, on time).
When this clown decides to join the civilized world, and he will, he'll have to go through the motions, but it's not that difficult if you're not in a hurry.
I've had a merchant account for about a decade, and worked in retail management for two and a half. Argue semantics all you want, I know what the agreements say.
t ml, is simply wrong (or at least 15 years out of date) on at least one point. It is illegal to require a phone number on a credit card purchase. It's illegal to even have a box labeled "phone number" on the charge slip. This is federal law, and has been for at least 15 years. (They're also badly out of date on credit card numbers written on checks, and on mail order regulations.) So I find that source less than credible. I find you less than credible, as well.
Again, I prefer to avoid doing business with companies that can't keep their promises.
http://www.creditinfocenter.com/cards/crcd_buy.sh
The next thing that they should go after is the concept that you don't actually *own* software that you purchase, you only "license" it.
Adobe v. Softman is old news, and addressed exactly that, and was ruled in the correct way. In California, at least, if you A) pay a set amount, and B) get indefinite use of the software for that payment, it's a Sale of Goods, and the Right of First Sale (under Title 17) applies. That ruling is at least four or five years old now.
This is why Microsoft is so desperate to get Windows and Office transferred over to a "pay per month or we turn it off" model.
Discounts for cash vs credit card are a violation of the merchant's agreement with the credit card company. I prefer not doing business with retailers who can't keep their written promises.
If he paid for the computer by credit card, he should have challenged the transaction on the basis of a defective product the company refused to make good on. It's a simple process, and the law favors him. Especially if he as a UPS receipt proving he shipped it back to them.
If he didn't pay with a credit card, he's an idiot for that.
How the hell do you get a small claims suit moved to a superior court? There's certainly no argument that aritration will be cheaper, because small claims costs less than $50 to file, and lawyers are prohibited. Gateway has already spent a hundred times what the computer is worth. The superior court judge, at this point, should be talking about kicking the whole thing back down to small claims.