Can the Kingdom of Tuva then try the entire US Congress?
Certainly. They can even convict them in abstentia and sentence them to death by stoning. What they can't do is actually capture those congressmen and carry out any kind of sentence... unless a congressman for some reason decides to visit the Kingdom of Tuva and give a paper about the art of soliciting bribes^H^H^Hdonations.
COMNET is bad about that too. I've taken to creating a special email address for it when registration time comes around and then deleting it afterwards. Then at the show if I actually want to speak to an exhibitor later I give them a business card with my real email address.
If others are doing similar things, this renders the exhibitors' lists worthless. Their whole point in going is to make industry contacts. Why should they bother to go if they don't get any value out of it?
As for COMDEX and bankruptcy, I don't get that. Las Vegas offers excellent prices to conventions so that they can attract the attendees to the casinos. Exhibitor fees should cover operational costs that aren't too extravagent, the training sessions are supposed to pay for themselves, and direct mail to prior attendees is cheap. How did they manage to piss away enough money to end up close to bankruptcy?
IMHO, some better (or at least more creative) options might be:
1) Affirm the right of the consumer to receive a full refund for any intellectual property which utilizes technological impediments to fair use. The right extends for 30 days from the date of purchase, cannot be voided by contract, and does not apply to media which contain no intentional impediments to duplication.
Skip the labelling stuff; just guarantee a refund and let the sellers determine which producers they're willing to sell for.
2) Create a "self-help discouragement" rule which says that the right to statutory damages for infringement is voided by the use of any technological self-help measures applied to prevent duplication. That way, producers which copy-protect their intellectual properties can only collect real damages for infringement.
When a producer employs copy protection to prevent unlawful distribution, what they're really doing is taking the law into their own hands. Its like a vigilante street patrol, only the casualty is our rights instead of our lives. The law should discourage vigilanteism in all its forms.
According to the GPL, you may not distribute GPL and non-GPL software in a combined form. You can use them together. Your customer can use them together. You can even distribute them on the same media. You may not distribute them in a combined form.
For embedded devices, this offers a trivial solution:
Put the GPL stuff on one flash card, put the non-GPL stuff on another flash card, put both cards in the box, and instruct the customer to put both cards in the device upon purchase. Put absolutely no GPL software on the non-GPL card, and put every last scrap of source code for the GPL card onto a CD which you include in the box with the device.
Oh, and in the manual in the license agreement, advise the customer it is unlawful to sell the device while the two cards are installed.
Of course, this means that you also have to seperate the software into modules and keep track of which ones are or are not GPL. But if you're just starting the project, that shouldn't be too much trouble.
Games fail when the designers start to think they're making movies. They're not very good at making movies, and even if they were they wouldn't be worth $50.
You know the games I'm talking about... Where the story is king, the plot is linear, and the game play is really just an interlude between expensive cut-scenes.
Game studios fail when they start to think of themselves as studios. They're not studios. They're not entertainers. They're computer programmers first and foremost, and when they forget that they "produce" crap.
How is it that the FCC registered digital TV frequencies overlap the FCC registered police emergency frequencies at all, miles apart or no?
Are we talking too much power on the TV's sideband, bleeding into the police frequency?
Are we talking a grandfathered police operation when the frequencies were reallocated to digital TV where the cops have had years now to realize that they were playing with fire and replace their communications system?
Surely the FCC didn't intentionally allocate a police frequency smack in the middle of the exact same bands they set aside for digitial TV. So what's the real story?
We all build on the backs of giants. Where would GNU be today without the original work on UNIX at AT&T? Maybe we should call it Lucent/GNU/Linux. Or maybe Turing/Lucent/GNU/Linux; must give a nod to the father of modern computing. Or maybe God/Turing/Lucent/GNU/Linux... After all, where would Linux be if Man did not exist?
The standard plan when exiting a professional job under less than ideal circumstances is this: You write your regretful resignation and your glowing reference. They sign both. You get a new job.
You can try other plans, but the thing is, the best professional jobs aren't found in the newspaper. You know someone who knows someone and they put your resume in front of the boss and vouch for you. Who's gonna put their rep on the line and vouch for someone who sued his previous company?
The old boys network isn't an old "boys" network any more, but it still works much the same: loyalty, talent and work ethic = connections. Connections = new and better jobs. No loyalty, no connections, no back door in. You get to beat the street with the rest of the losers no one will vouch for. Know what? You weren't the first security guard with a bachelor's degree, and you won't be the last.
An attorney for the consortium of technology companies [...] says rules are designed to reflect home use -- while addressing piracy fears that prevent Hollywood from releasing more high-quality content. [...] Cablevision violated strict licensing agreements when it imposed copy bans on generic cable programming -- shows that consumers should be entitled to copy freely.
If the rules are intended to protect the consumer then that will be reflected by the penalty applied to cablevision for violating the "strict license agreements." What penalty? Exactly.
Its on the eBay search-results page, after using an icon on the left to narrow the search to a particular category. Probability to either the banner ad at the top or the iframe at the bottom. Both displayed incorrectly as well under 1.1.
I hope they do better on 1.2 than they did on 1.1. I couldn't browse eBay for 10 minutes without 1.1 crashing under Windows 98 and I got similar results under Windows ME. 1.1 release that is; I didn't try the beta.
I had to drop back to 1.0. 1.0 was very stable. I hope they use as much caution on 1.2.
I configured Postfix to reject based on headers:/Microsoft\ Exchange
And this could probably be generalized to reject based on finding Received headers already attached to the message where the server wasn't explicitly preauthorized, since client MUA's like Eudora don't add Received headers and servers generally do.
But as a general purpose method it has a problem: It doesn't work out of the box on any mail software. Unless your mail admin is also a software developer type, he won't be able to do this. Furthermore, most mail software can't do this without much more difficult programming than postfix. Rigging this even in Sendmail 8.12 would be... heinous.
And, as you said, it doesn't work if the originating server isn't connected 24/7. Then they really do need to smarthost.
And every authorization and every bit of coding all takes manpower. From a business perspective its becomes really hard to justify that manpower versus simply configuring the server to obey the vigilantes' judgements on who is an open relay. Which brings us full circle to the problem.
You can insist to have the source code of the software if you got it
Not necessarily. Read the GPL: the penalty for breach is that your rights under the license are terminated. No more, no less.
And that's if anyone can make the GPL stick; the company could easily claim that they errantly failed to license the software but certainly never agreed to the GPL. The GPL is, after all, a shrink-wrap license. Last I checked those are valid only in Virginia and Maryland.
No license = no rights for anyone but the copyright holders. And for them, reparations = cash only unless the company offers and they accept something else.
There were several problems in making this work: (1) you need hardware support,
OKay, so what are the hardware issues on an x86 platform as it pertains to a positive or negative growing stack? Are their particular instructions used to maintain the stack for which no positive-direction instruction exists?
Does the situation change if we use RISC machines instead of x86 machines?
(2) you end up fighting code that assumes stack growth is downwards.
Outside of compiler optimizations, I'd bet there isn't much of this out there. More troubling would be the slew of one-off errors that suddenly showed up due to the change.
Based on what he says in his diatribe, he has his server configured to allow relay based on the sender email address.
Generally speaking I agree with you. Here at the ISP I work for, we'd consider that an open relay and insist that the customer fix it. But that's not the whole story:
Modify the situation a bit so that you have two servers. Server1, run by a nitwit, is an open relay. It doesn't send mail to the Internet, though. It sends all its mail to Server2 which sends its mail to the Internet. Server2 is a well secured server. It relays for server1 (a legitimate practive called "smarthosting") but does not relay for any random server.
As a large organization, how does the system administrator prevent Server2 from becoming an open relay? IPs are assigned and reassigned. A server IP this week could be a dialup which MUST use a smarthost next week. The folks in charge of the respective resources may not even be in the same building, and if they had to tightly coordinate every time, no work would ever get done. Even if the blacklist operator sends a notification about the open "input relay," another nitwit in a different part of the network will errantly set up a new input relay before the old one is shut down.
It turns out that to keep Server2 off the open relay blacklists, Server2 must subscribe to the blacklists. That's the only way to make Server2 stop accepting email from Server1 as soon as Server1 appears on the blacklist.
Scrutinize that last paragraph, because its very important. Its not enough for the server's operator to subscribe to the vigilantes' view of right or wrong. The server operator must also subscribe to the vigilantes' judgement on who has broken their rules or face that judgement himself.
I can't be the only one who sees something fundamentally wrong with that solution.
Third, stacks on the Multics processors grew in the positive direction, rather than the negative direction. This meant that if you actually accomplished a buffer overflow, you would be overwriting unused stack frames rather than your own return pointer, making exploitation much more difficult.
How hard would this be to integrate this into GNU C and Linux? As I understand it, growing the heap from the bottom and growing the stack from the top with the yet unused space in the middle is just a matter of convention. How much trouble would it be to reverse the two so that the heap grows from the top and the stack from the bottom?
Seems like it ought to be a simple patch to the most vexing class of security problems we all experience.
Over two hundred million dollars and six years of work have been spent on CLCS to date. CLCS is roughly 70% finished. [...] The CLCS main development has roughly two more years to go. The exact schedule is not completely predictable, nor is its final cost.
On a "modern techniques" replacement for a program than ran on a machine with a 16-bit address space? Do I detect the stench of committee designed software with a whiff of low bidder? Yikes!
Developers like to figure out how things work. Then we like to brag about it.
Make sure enough of the API is open. The more the merrier. And make sure that no legal restrictions hamper our tinkering. If anything, support forums that encourage discovery and tinkering related to your developers' program.
You can break every other rule, but if you break the NO SECRECY rule your developers' program will always be second rate.
The clever move would be to offer the content on-demand via the Internet. Include the commercials embedded in the content. No one is going to strip the commercials and put it back up; who'd waste their bandwidth when the program was available on demand in all the desired encodings? (See BAEN webscriptions.net for an example of how this actually works for another media type, right now, today)
Then, rig a number of versions of the download which stash the commercials in different places. Each 30-minute show has at least the following places to stash commercials: Before the title, after the title, planned mid-show break, before the credits, after the credits. Given that each spot can hold 1 or more commercials of variable length, you'd make it relatively hard to archive all of the breakpoints for all possible variations. Especially if the commercials change from month to month.
Folks could still skip the commercials by hand or strip them from their personally downloaded copy, but that's OK... by hand gives you a chance to capture their interest before they skip it just like with the modern remote control. Double the chance really, because with a remote the commercials are usually over before you click back from another station but with a PVR you'll scroll back to find where the show restarted (and scroll back into the tail of the final ad).
I've been searching for this sort of thing as well. Key features for me are:
1) Sidetracks telephone numbers not in a whitelist to a message which says something like "Telemarketers are unwelcome; others press 1 to ring through."
2) Encodes voicemail to MP3 and forwards it to my email box. That way I can use the mouse to slide forward and back through the message, save important messages easily, and listen to it on my OK computer speakers instead of the crappy speakerphone speakers.
Do any of the mentioned systems support that sort of thing?
Common law, contract law, and the "unclean hands" principle goes back long before there was a constitution.
All the way back to Britain as a matter of fact. But each has been modified in the past two centuries as a consequence of constitutional challenges. The impact they have on modern law reflects those adjustments.
a non-compete clause that prohibits me from participating, as an owner, in any other company that sells a similar service.
This obligation ceases upon termination of the contract, and you are able to terminate the contract at your option in a relatively short period of time, yes? As you know, a similar contract which didn't meet those preconditions would have a relatively difficult time surviving in court.
I will stand by that statement until I see one case where a judge through out a contract's clause based on that reason.
Well, okay, you want black and white and I see shades of gray. Have it your way.
Which if I remember right is largely a common law matter set through a whole laundry list of precedent, much of which leads back to decisions on constitutional issues.
[You can still sue and win is] Not a constitutional issue.
Originates from due process, which is a constitutional issue.
I would like to see a case where it said [that you can put up to a 1-meter dish or antenna]
Actually, this isn't constitutional at all. Its FCC rules. They trump everything but the constitution and acts of congress with respect to installation of an antenna up to 1 meter in diameter for the purpose of receiving audio/visual signals where that installation is in a location of your exclusive control. You can even do it if you rent, and your landlord doesn't have the right to say no. In fact, if they want to challenge your installation, they're only permitted to take it to the FCC. The local legal system is specifically barred from ruling on the matter.
They did that to help the Satellite TV industry get off the ground. Look it up!
In the more general case, property use covenants are challenged all the time, with very mixed results.
Non-compete clauses in business contracts aren't usually given that kind of scrutiny.
I'm unable to think of a non-compete clause in a contract which does not impact an individual's employment prospects but does impact that individual's rights. Perhaps you could offer an example?
not aware of any [contract] being thrown out because the clause was unconstitutional.
Of course not. The body of law that supports it is challenged instead, and if challenged successfully then the contract clause is voided based on the revised body of law.
So, most of this isn't directly constitutional, but to say that there is "no constitutional limit" is "not strictly true."
There is no constitutional limit on what clauses a contract can contain.
That's not strictly true. NDA's can't prevent you from whistle-blowing on criminal misconduct, for example.
You can still sue and win after signing an arbitration clause... The Judge won't throw it out, but he is likely to rule against you unless you first go to arbitration and then show that the arbitrator was unreasonably biased... And you'll have to prove specific damages; the damages called for in the contract are only valid in arbitration.
You can put up to a 1-meter dish or antenna on your house regardless of any covenants you agree to, and only the most narrowly defined non-competes are upheld in court.
The no-criticism clauses aren't just over the line... When combined with the binding shrink-wrap terms, they're so far over the line that the line isn't visible from where they are. Its doubtful that they'd survive scrutiny in any court, regardless of the state laws. But then, they shouldn't have to be tested in court in the first place: they should be impossible from the start.
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Can the Kingdom of Tuva then try the entire US Congress?
Certainly. They can even convict them in abstentia and sentence them to death by stoning. What they can't do is actually capture those congressmen and carry out any kind of sentence... unless a congressman for some reason decides to visit the Kingdom of Tuva and give a paper about the art of soliciting bribes^H^H^Hdonations.
In related news, I'm a thief because I channel-surf or visit the toilet during loud TV commercials.
COMNET is bad about that too. I've taken to creating a special email address for it when registration time comes around and then deleting it afterwards. Then at the show if I actually want to speak to an exhibitor later I give them a business card with my real email address.
If others are doing similar things, this renders the exhibitors' lists worthless. Their whole point in going is to make industry contacts. Why should they bother to go if they don't get any value out of it?
As for COMDEX and bankruptcy, I don't get that. Las Vegas offers excellent prices to conventions so that they can attract the attendees to the casinos. Exhibitor fees should cover operational costs that aren't too extravagent, the training sessions are supposed to pay for themselves, and direct mail to prior attendees is cheap. How did they manage to piss away enough money to end up close to bankruptcy?
IMHO, some better (or at least more creative) options might be:
1) Affirm the right of the consumer to receive a full refund for any intellectual property which utilizes technological impediments to fair use. The right extends for 30 days from the date of purchase, cannot be voided by contract, and does not apply to media which contain no intentional impediments to duplication.
Skip the labelling stuff; just guarantee a refund and let the sellers determine which producers they're willing to sell for.
2) Create a "self-help discouragement" rule which says that the right to statutory damages for infringement is voided by the use of any technological self-help measures applied to prevent duplication. That way, producers which copy-protect their intellectual properties can only collect real damages for infringement.
When a producer employs copy protection to prevent unlawful distribution, what they're really doing is taking the law into their own hands. Its like a vigilante street patrol, only the casualty is our rights instead of our lives. The law should discourage vigilanteism in all its forms.
According to the GPL, you may not distribute GPL and non-GPL software in a combined form. You can use them together. Your customer can use them together. You can even distribute them on the same media. You may not distribute them in a combined form.
For embedded devices, this offers a trivial solution:
Put the GPL stuff on one flash card, put the non-GPL stuff on another flash card, put both cards in the box, and instruct the customer to put both cards in the device upon purchase. Put absolutely no GPL software on the non-GPL card, and put every last scrap of source code for the GPL card onto a CD which you include in the box with the device.
Oh, and in the manual in the license agreement, advise the customer it is unlawful to sell the device while the two cards are installed.
Of course, this means that you also have to seperate the software into modules and keep track of which ones are or are not GPL. But if you're just starting the project, that shouldn't be too much trouble.
Games fail when the designers start to think they're making movies. They're not very good at making movies, and even if they were they wouldn't be worth $50.
You know the games I'm talking about... Where the story is king, the plot is linear, and the game play is really just an interlude between expensive cut-scenes.
Game studios fail when they start to think of themselves as studios. They're not studios. They're not entertainers. They're computer programmers first and foremost, and when they forget that they "produce" crap.
How is it that the FCC registered digital TV frequencies overlap the FCC registered police emergency frequencies at all, miles apart or no?
Are we talking too much power on the TV's sideband, bleeding into the police frequency?
Are we talking a grandfathered police operation when the frequencies were reallocated to digital TV where the cops have had years now to realize that they were playing with fire and replace their communications system?
Surely the FCC didn't intentionally allocate a police frequency smack in the middle of the exact same bands they set aside for digitial TV. So what's the real story?
We all build on the backs of giants. Where would GNU be today without the original work on UNIX at AT&T? Maybe we should call it Lucent/GNU/Linux. Or maybe Turing/Lucent/GNU/Linux; must give a nod to the father of modern computing. Or maybe God/Turing/Lucent/GNU/Linux... After all, where would Linux be if Man did not exist?
The standard plan when exiting a professional job under less than ideal circumstances is this: You write your regretful resignation and your glowing reference. They sign both. You get a new job.
You can try other plans, but the thing is, the best professional jobs aren't found in the newspaper. You know someone who knows someone and they put your resume in front of the boss and vouch for you. Who's gonna put their rep on the line and vouch for someone who sued his previous company?
The old boys network isn't an old "boys" network any more, but it still works much the same: loyalty, talent and work ethic = connections. Connections = new and better jobs. No loyalty, no connections, no back door in. You get to beat the street with the rest of the losers no one will vouch for. Know what? You weren't the first security guard with a bachelor's degree, and you won't be the last.
An attorney for the consortium of technology companies [...] says rules are designed to reflect home use -- while addressing piracy fears that prevent Hollywood from releasing more high-quality content. [...] Cablevision violated strict licensing agreements when it imposed copy bans on generic cable programming -- shows that consumers should be entitled to copy freely.
If the rules are intended to protect the consumer then that will be reflected by the penalty applied to cablevision for violating the "strict license agreements." What penalty? Exactly.
Its on the eBay search-results page, after using an icon on the left to narrow the search to a particular category. Probability to either the banner ad at the top or the iframe at the bottom. Both displayed incorrectly as well under 1.1.
I hope they do better on 1.2 than they did on 1.1. I couldn't browse eBay for 10 minutes without 1.1 crashing under Windows 98 and I got similar results under Windows ME. 1.1 release that is; I didn't try the beta.
I had to drop back to 1.0. 1.0 was very stable. I hope they use as much caution on 1.2.
I configured Postfix to reject based on headers: /Microsoft\ Exchange
And this could probably be generalized to reject based on finding Received headers already attached to the message where the server wasn't explicitly preauthorized, since client MUA's like Eudora don't add Received headers and servers generally do.
But as a general purpose method it has a problem: It doesn't work out of the box on any mail software. Unless your mail admin is also a software developer type, he won't be able to do this. Furthermore, most mail software can't do this without much more difficult programming than postfix. Rigging this even in Sendmail 8.12 would be... heinous.
And, as you said, it doesn't work if the originating server isn't connected 24/7. Then they really do need to smarthost.
And every authorization and every bit of coding all takes manpower. From a business perspective its becomes really hard to justify that manpower versus simply configuring the server to obey the vigilantes' judgements on who is an open relay. Which brings us full circle to the problem.
You can insist to have the source code of the software if you got it
Not necessarily. Read the GPL: the penalty for breach is that your rights under the license are terminated. No more, no less.
And that's if anyone can make the GPL stick; the company could easily claim that they errantly failed to license the software but certainly never agreed to the GPL. The GPL is, after all, a shrink-wrap license. Last I checked those are valid only in Virginia and Maryland.
No license = no rights for anyone but the copyright holders. And for them, reparations = cash only unless the company offers and they accept something else.
Addresses on the stack should not be executable in the first place. That's the real fix.
Half a fix: it doesn't protect the return pointer, so it can be used to bridge off into other code even if it can't be used to input arbitrary code.
Besides, there is already a patch for Linux which implements that.
There were several problems in making this work: (1) you need hardware support,
OKay, so what are the hardware issues on an x86 platform as it pertains to a positive or negative growing stack? Are their particular instructions used to maintain the stack for which no positive-direction instruction exists?
Does the situation change if we use RISC machines instead of x86 machines?
(2) you end up fighting code that assumes stack growth is downwards.
Outside of compiler optimizations, I'd bet there isn't much of this out there. More troubling would be the slew of one-off errors that suddenly showed up due to the change.
Based on what he says in his diatribe, he has his server configured to allow relay based on the sender email address.
Generally speaking I agree with you. Here at the ISP I work for, we'd consider that an open relay and insist that the customer fix it. But that's not the whole story:
Modify the situation a bit so that you have two servers. Server1, run by a nitwit, is an open relay. It doesn't send mail to the Internet, though. It sends all its mail to Server2 which sends its mail to the Internet. Server2 is a well secured server. It relays for server1 (a legitimate practive called "smarthosting") but does not relay for any random server.
As a large organization, how does the system administrator prevent Server2 from becoming an open relay? IPs are assigned and reassigned. A server IP this week could be a dialup which MUST use a smarthost next week. The folks in charge of the respective resources may not even be in the same building, and if they had to tightly coordinate every time, no work would ever get done. Even if the blacklist operator sends a notification about the open "input relay," another nitwit in a different part of the network will errantly set up a new input relay before the old one is shut down.
It turns out that to keep Server2 off the open relay blacklists, Server2 must subscribe to the blacklists. That's the only way to make Server2 stop accepting email from Server1 as soon as Server1 appears on the blacklist.
Scrutinize that last paragraph, because its very important. Its not enough for the server's operator to subscribe to the vigilantes' view of right or wrong. The server operator must also subscribe to the vigilantes' judgement on who has broken their rules or face that judgement himself.
I can't be the only one who sees something fundamentally wrong with that solution.
Third, stacks on the Multics processors grew in the positive direction, rather than the negative direction. This meant that if you actually accomplished a buffer overflow, you would be overwriting unused stack frames rather than your own return pointer, making exploitation much more difficult.
How hard would this be to integrate this into GNU C and Linux? As I understand it, growing the heap from the bottom and growing the stack from the top with the yet unused space in the middle is just a matter of convention. How much trouble would it be to reverse the two so that the heap grows from the top and the stack from the bottom?
Seems like it ought to be a simple patch to the most vexing class of security problems we all experience.
Over two hundred million dollars and six years of work have been spent on CLCS to date. CLCS is roughly 70% finished. [...] The CLCS main development has roughly two more years to go. The exact schedule is not completely predictable, nor is its final cost.
On a "modern techniques" replacement for a program than ran on a machine with a 16-bit address space? Do I detect the stench of committee designed software with a whiff of low bidder? Yikes!
NO SECRECY!
Developers like to figure out how things work. Then we like to brag about it.
Make sure enough of the API is open. The more the merrier. And make sure that no legal restrictions hamper our tinkering. If anything, support forums that encourage discovery and tinkering related to your developers' program.
You can break every other rule, but if you break the NO SECRECY rule your developers' program will always be second rate.
The clever move would be to offer the content on-demand via the Internet. Include the commercials embedded in the content. No one is going to strip the commercials and put it back up; who'd waste their bandwidth when the program was available on demand in all the desired encodings? (See BAEN webscriptions.net for an example of how this actually works for another media type, right now, today)
Then, rig a number of versions of the download which stash the commercials in different places. Each 30-minute show has at least the following places to stash commercials: Before the title, after the title, planned mid-show break, before the credits, after the credits. Given that each spot can hold 1 or more commercials of variable length, you'd make it relatively hard to archive all of the breakpoints for all possible variations. Especially if the commercials change from month to month.
Folks could still skip the commercials by hand or strip them from their personally downloaded copy, but that's OK... by hand gives you a chance to capture their interest before they skip it just like with the modern remote control. Double the chance really, because with a remote the commercials are usually over before you click back from another station but with a PVR you'll scroll back to find where the show restarted (and scroll back into the tail of the final ad).
I've been searching for this sort of thing as well. Key features for me are:
1) Sidetracks telephone numbers not in a whitelist to a message which says something like "Telemarketers are unwelcome; others press 1 to ring through."
2) Encodes voicemail to MP3 and forwards it to my email box. That way I can use the mouse to slide forward and back through the message, save important messages easily, and listen to it on my OK computer speakers instead of the crappy speakerphone speakers.
Do any of the mentioned systems support that sort of thing?
Common law, contract law, and the "unclean hands" principle goes back long before there was a constitution.
All the way back to Britain as a matter of fact. But each has been modified in the past two centuries as a consequence of constitutional challenges. The impact they have on modern law reflects those adjustments.
a non-compete clause that prohibits me from participating, as an owner, in any other company that sells a similar service.
This obligation ceases upon termination of the contract, and you are able to terminate the contract at your option in a relatively short period of time, yes? As you know, a similar contract which didn't meet those preconditions would have a relatively difficult time surviving in court.
I will stand by that statement until I see one case where a judge through out a contract's clause based on that reason.
Well, okay, you want black and white and I see shades of gray. Have it your way.
"unclean hands"
Which if I remember right is largely a common law matter set through a whole laundry list of precedent, much of which leads back to decisions on constitutional issues.
[You can still sue and win is] Not a constitutional issue.
Originates from due process, which is a constitutional issue.
I would like to see a case where it said [that you can put up to a 1-meter dish or antenna]
Actually, this isn't constitutional at all. Its FCC rules. They trump everything but the constitution and acts of congress with respect to installation of an antenna up to 1 meter in diameter for the purpose of receiving audio/visual signals where that installation is in a location of your exclusive control. You can even do it if you rent, and your landlord doesn't have the right to say no. In fact, if they want to challenge your installation, they're only permitted to take it to the FCC. The local legal system is specifically barred from ruling on the matter.
They did that to help the Satellite TV industry get off the ground. Look it up!
In the more general case, property use covenants are challenged all the time, with very mixed results.
Non-compete clauses in business contracts aren't usually given that kind of scrutiny.
I'm unable to think of a non-compete clause in a contract which does not impact an individual's employment prospects but does impact that individual's rights. Perhaps you could offer an example?
not aware of any [contract] being thrown out because the clause was unconstitutional.
Of course not. The body of law that supports it is challenged instead, and if challenged successfully then the contract clause is voided based on the revised body of law.
So, most of this isn't directly constitutional, but to say that there is "no constitutional limit" is "not strictly true."
There is no constitutional limit on what clauses a contract can contain.
That's not strictly true. NDA's can't prevent you from whistle-blowing on criminal misconduct, for example.
You can still sue and win after signing an arbitration clause... The Judge won't throw it out, but he is likely to rule against you unless you first go to arbitration and then show that the arbitrator was unreasonably biased... And you'll have to prove specific damages; the damages called for in the contract are only valid in arbitration.
You can put up to a 1-meter dish or antenna on your house regardless of any covenants you agree to, and only the most narrowly defined non-competes are upheld in court.
The no-criticism clauses aren't just over the line... When combined with the binding shrink-wrap terms, they're so far over the line that the line isn't visible from where they are. Its doubtful that they'd survive scrutiny in any court, regardless of the state laws. But then, they shouldn't have to be tested in court in the first place: they should be impossible from the start.