You're definitely right to say that users will pay for specific content, especially trade-related content (your thousand-dollar newsletters). My firm pays through the nose for content, some of it web-specific, a lot of it web-accessible, because law is heavily research-driven. But we'd be paying (and often are paying) for the same products on paper anyway.
Personally, I pay for a very few sites, including one (Fark) which I won't be paying for anymore because of signal/noise problems. I won't buy the cow, though, when they are giving the milk away for free, so I'll never pay for newspaper content unless it was for a critical piece of research. Someone's always going to be reprinting the wire for free.
You just keep making a fool of yourself, Rogerborg. IAAL, and I can tell you that most practising lawyers are inexpert in most fields in which they practise.
It is the academics and professors who are generally the foremost experts on legal matters. When experts on the law are required, particularly on technical or recherche subjects like public software licensing, the experts are most often academics rather than practising lawyers.
Yes, the professorship at Columbia carries a lot more "credentials" in the legal field than 25 years of slogging it in litigation, or licensing work, or what have you.
Practising lawyers defer to the expertise of academics all the time. We have to; they have the time to study issues in depth. Practising lawyers can't do the same in most cases, because your client would murder you if they found out that you spent 100 hours of your time, on their dime, researching a point instead of relying on the expertise that is out there.
Don't let your ignorance get in the way of ranting, though. It's endearing.
This is not correct. In most places, parents are not generally held liable for the torts of their children unless they consented to, or directed the act.
Some U.S. states (actually except NH and NY appaerntly) have changed this by statute. Illinois is one... parents there are liable for intentional torts only, and the limit of liability is $1000. The average over all states is $4100 maximum liability.
Of course, these aren't torts exactly, so I'm not sure whether DMCA-type violations would be caught under these "paerntal responsibility" laws.
You may be responsible _to your ISP_ for acts using your connection, but you can't be responsible to other parties through signing a contract with your ISP; that's just nutty.
It may be that you indemnify your ISP against actions taken against it by third parties due to acts using your connection. That is not the same as taking some sort of "legal responsibility" for acts using your ISP.
A contract *only* affects your rights vis-a-vis the other parties to the contract. It *cannot* affect your rights vis-a-vis third parties. This is a fundamental principle of contract law.
I will make a deliberately self-referential post with no on-topic content whatsoever, and follow it up with a meaningless sentence just to add a dash more obscurity.
Tennis just came eastward from helping large pencils fly rodomontade stapled longboats into Holy Scipture.
You could spend a whole year just in Washington alone. But if you only have a short time there, go to the Air & Space Museum first. I've been there three times now (I'm from Canada, don't get to DC much) and every time it just blows my mind.
My law firm had a dinner there one evening last year in the great foyer hall, under all the oribters and rockets and planes, and we got hours of uninterrupted time in the museum. I've never been happier with my job, not ever.
People that are under investigation do not have the same rights as those that are not under investigation. You seem to have the same all-or-nothing problem that seems to be so prominent. For instance. If you have your car stolen by your argument police would NOT have the investigative power to go into the chop shop with a warrant because of the locked door. People do lose some of their rights when there is sufficent reason for the police to suspect you.
No, I'm sorry, this isn't correct. No one loses their rights when they are under investigation; believing that they do is the first step towards acknowledging that "rights" are something that governments give you, a privilege that can be taken away. That's what governments want you to think; and it's exactly backwards.
Your rights are INALIENABLE, you *always* have your rights, no matter what actions the government might take to quash them. They are yours as a member of the polity, or as a member of the human race.
Why, then, can the government break down the doors of those who are suspected of a crime, or arrest someone on probable cause, or imprison them if found guilty? The reason is not that your rights disappear, but because we allow that in certain circumstances, your rights are trumped by the need for a government to police us and maintain public order, functions that we the people entrust to them, and which they have at OUR pleasure. That's it... the *only* reason that rights are superseded (not "lost", or even "suspended") is the presence of a greater potential harm to society than the temporary superseding of your rights would be.
I tend to agree that the encouragement towards innovation in a short copyright term is a good thing, but it is counterbalanced to me by the fact that it doesn't allow creative people to retire.
I'd like to see a term of 25 years or the life of the author, whichever comes last, or a straight 25 years for corporate copyrights.
I think you missed the point. The problem isn't with copyright per se, but with the ridiculously extended terms of copyright. The "piracy" issue - I know the term is ridiculous but at least we all understand it - isn't touched by whether copyright terms are 25 years, or 60 years, or author's life plus 95 years.
Even a 10-year copyright term would be sufficient to counter the problems you are pointing to.
Yep, I'm a former philosophy grad student and teacher of ethics, and I agree fully with the AC. I am sure this guy means well, but this is the ethical and philosopical equivalent of Time Cube.
Remember, the next time you buy a diamond for your sweetie, slave (and probably child) labor, blood, sweat and tears literally goes into each one. Ahh...nothing says love like the suffering of your fellow man.
If this concerns you, then you should probably buy Canadian Arctic Diamonds which are exploitation- and conflict-free.
My first ever system was the Coleco Telstar my father brought home when I was three or four... which places it around '75 or '76.
Man, was that system ever fun. That thing was built like a tank... considering how much we played it until I got my C64 at Christmas in 1981, it should have fallen apart.
I still remember the first C64 game I had... "Pogo Joe". That and a bunch of games I typed in from Compute's Gazette magazine. A friend at the time had had a Sinclair ZX81 for about a year and I had been so envious!
If you can get train a carnival chicken to pass and to parse strings of ASCII characters within 72 hours, you deserve to win no matter how bad a player it is.
Yup, bloated and stupid certainly do spring vividly from between the lines.
Essentially, though, this shows the incredible power of corporate management. This is a company who are hemorrhaging $37 for every dollar they earn in *gross* revenue, and show no reasonable prospects of ever being profitable again... and instead of stepping aside and closing up shop, management, in return for a kickback of $3 million, want to sell the shareholders' investment at a 50% discount instead of giving it back to the shareholders.
The fact that there is even a battle about this shows how easily led most shareholders are and how antagonistic modern management can be to the owners' interests.
For all the talk about the shareholders wanting to liquidate being "corporate raiders", it seems that they, at least, are willing to face reality. There's no reason why Alliance can't buy any assets of Liquid Audio they want... in an auction, and then instead of forcing all the owners into a business they might not want to be a part of, they can choose whether they want to back that particular pony with their takings. I'm betting most of them wouldn't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.
All a merger does is force everyone's hand into investing a "new kind of company".
Yes. "Cash" in business-speak means any easily liquefiable investments, usually short-term stuff like commercial paper or even long-term stuff which is easy to liquidate like T-bills. It doesn't mean greenbacks, and most of it usually isn't kept in bank accounts either.
Jason, as far as I can tell you are in no danger. 42 USC 1983, the "civil action for deprivation of rights" section (I think it is part of the famous Civil Right Act... I'm not a U.S. lawyer) seems to have no parallel in Canada, notably none in our provincial human rights codes. Of course, since we don't actually have much free speech in Canada, it doesn't matter anyway.
Your university will probably have a human rights code which you should be aware of; it may deal with speech issues which as a network admin you may need to be aware of... Canadian law is particularly draconian in dealing with situations where someone is told something they think is hurtful.
Biener is being typically lawyerly and attempting to intimidate weave. The idea that Biener could sue him, or his college, for spamblocking and win is utterly ridiculous, any more so than that he could sue and win if he were thrown out of a college cafeteria for screaming his campaign slogans in people's faces.
As has been pointed out above, parties and even state entities are perfectly allowed to make reasonable regulation of the *manner* of speech employed within their purview. There is no content regulation going on here; this is regulation of manner.
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Darl McBride? Now there's one user that *has* to go in my Foes list.
I don't, but I think a couple of my other personalities do.
You're definitely right to say that users will pay for specific content, especially trade-related content (your thousand-dollar newsletters). My firm pays through the nose for content, some of it web-specific, a lot of it web-accessible, because law is heavily research-driven. But we'd be paying (and often are paying) for the same products on paper anyway.
Personally, I pay for a very few sites, including one (Fark) which I won't be paying for anymore because of signal/noise problems. I won't buy the cow, though, when they are giving the milk away for free, so I'll never pay for newspaper content unless it was for a critical piece of research. Someone's always going to be reprinting the wire for free.
Well, checkyoulater, this wouldn't be the first time things have gone astray...
You just keep making a fool of yourself, Rogerborg. IAAL, and I can tell you that most practising lawyers are inexpert in most fields in which they practise.
It is the academics and professors who are generally the foremost experts on legal matters. When experts on the law are required, particularly on technical or recherche subjects like public software licensing, the experts are most often academics rather than practising lawyers.
Yes, the professorship at Columbia carries a lot more "credentials" in the legal field than 25 years of slogging it in litigation, or licensing work, or what have you.
Practising lawyers defer to the expertise of academics all the time. We have to; they have the time to study issues in depth. Practising lawyers can't do the same in most cases, because your client would murder you if they found out that you spent 100 hours of your time, on their dime, researching a point instead of relying on the expertise that is out there.
Don't let your ignorance get in the way of ranting, though. It's endearing.
This is not correct. In most places, parents are not generally held liable for the torts of their children unless they consented to, or directed the act.
Some U.S. states (actually except NH and NY appaerntly) have changed this by statute. Illinois is one... parents there are liable for intentional torts only, and the limit of liability is $1000. The average over all states is $4100 maximum liability.
Of course, these aren't torts exactly, so I'm not sure whether DMCA-type violations would be caught under these "paerntal responsibility" laws.
You may be responsible _to your ISP_ for acts using your connection, but you can't be responsible to other parties through signing a contract with your ISP; that's just nutty.
It may be that you indemnify your ISP against actions taken against it by third parties due to acts using your connection. That is not the same as taking some sort of "legal responsibility" for acts using your ISP.
A contract *only* affects your rights vis-a-vis the other parties to the contract. It *cannot* affect your rights vis-a-vis third parties. This is a fundamental principle of contract law.
I will make a deliberately self-referential post with no on-topic content whatsoever, and follow it up with a meaningless sentence just to add a dash more obscurity.
Tennis just came eastward from helping large pencils fly rodomontade stapled longboats into Holy Scipture.
You could spend a whole year just in Washington alone. But if you only have a short time there, go to the Air & Space Museum first. I've been there three times now (I'm from Canada, don't get to DC much) and every time it just blows my mind.
My law firm had a dinner there one evening last year in the great foyer hall, under all the oribters and rockets and planes, and we got hours of uninterrupted time in the museum. I've never been happier with my job, not ever.
No, I'm sorry, this isn't correct. No one loses their rights when they are under investigation; believing that they do is the first step towards acknowledging that "rights" are something that governments give you, a privilege that can be taken away. That's what governments want you to think; and it's exactly backwards.
Your rights are INALIENABLE, you *always* have your rights, no matter what actions the government might take to quash them. They are yours as a member of the polity, or as a member of the human race.
Why, then, can the government break down the doors of those who are suspected of a crime, or arrest someone on probable cause, or imprison them if found guilty? The reason is not that your rights disappear, but because we allow that in certain circumstances, your rights are trumped by the need for a government to police us and maintain public order, functions that we the people entrust to them, and which they have at OUR pleasure. That's it... the *only* reason that rights are superseded (not "lost", or even "suspended") is the presence of a greater potential harm to society than the temporary superseding of your rights would be.
My strong passwords are 16 and 18 characters.
It's a tough fight. They're doing well.
I tend to agree that the encouragement towards innovation in a short copyright term is a good thing, but it is counterbalanced to me by the fact that it doesn't allow creative people to retire.
I'd like to see a term of 25 years or the life of the author, whichever comes last, or a straight 25 years for corporate copyrights.
Even a 10-year copyright term would be sufficient to counter the problems you are pointing to.
I think Minnesota's official state bird is the blackfly, is it not?
Yep, I'm a former philosophy grad student and teacher of ethics, and I agree fully with the AC. I am sure this guy means well, but this is the ethical and philosopical equivalent of Time Cube.
I watched it and was bored to tears; does that qualify? It wasn't a bad movie, just not really my taste.
Oh, the shame...
Remember, the next time you buy a diamond for your sweetie, slave (and probably child) labor, blood, sweat and tears literally goes into each one. Ahh...nothing says love like the suffering of your fellow man. If this concerns you, then you should probably buy Canadian Arctic Diamonds which are exploitation- and conflict-free.
Freshmeat.
My first ever system was the Coleco Telstar my father brought home when I was three or four... which places it around '75 or '76.
Man, was that system ever fun. That thing was built like a tank... considering how much we played it until I got my C64 at Christmas in 1981, it should have fallen apart.
I still remember the first C64 game I had... "Pogo Joe". That and a bunch of games I typed in from Compute's Gazette magazine. A friend at the time had had a Sinclair ZX81 for about a year and I had been so envious!
If you can get train a carnival chicken to pass and to parse strings of ASCII characters within 72 hours, you deserve to win no matter how bad a player it is.
Of course, if you get rural enough, there's no power lines either.
Yup, bloated and stupid certainly do spring vividly from between the lines.
Essentially, though, this shows the incredible power of corporate management. This is a company who are hemorrhaging $37 for every dollar they earn in *gross* revenue, and show no reasonable prospects of ever being profitable again... and instead of stepping aside and closing up shop, management, in return for a kickback of $3 million, want to sell the shareholders' investment at a 50% discount instead of giving it back to the shareholders.
The fact that there is even a battle about this shows how easily led most shareholders are and how antagonistic modern management can be to the owners' interests.
For all the talk about the shareholders wanting to liquidate being "corporate raiders", it seems that they, at least, are willing to face reality. There's no reason why Alliance can't buy any assets of Liquid Audio they want... in an auction, and then instead of forcing all the owners into a business they might not want to be a part of, they can choose whether they want to back that particular pony with their takings. I'm betting most of them wouldn't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.
All a merger does is force everyone's hand into investing a "new kind of company".
Yes. "Cash" in business-speak means any easily liquefiable investments, usually short-term stuff like commercial paper or even long-term stuff which is easy to liquidate like T-bills. It doesn't mean greenbacks, and most of it usually isn't kept in bank accounts either.
Jason, as far as I can tell you are in no danger. 42 USC 1983, the "civil action for deprivation of rights" section (I think it is part of the famous Civil Right Act... I'm not a U.S. lawyer) seems to have no parallel in Canada, notably none in our provincial human rights codes. Of course, since we don't actually have much free speech in Canada, it doesn't matter anyway.
Your university will probably have a human rights code which you should be aware of; it may deal with speech issues which as a network admin you may need to be aware of... Canadian law is particularly draconian in dealing with situations where someone is told something they think is hurtful.
Biener is being typically lawyerly and attempting to intimidate weave. The idea that Biener could sue him, or his college, for spamblocking and win is utterly ridiculous, any more so than that he could sue and win if he were thrown out of a college cafeteria for screaming his campaign slogans in people's faces.
As has been pointed out above, parties and even state entities are perfectly allowed to make reasonable regulation of the *manner* of speech employed within their purview. There is no content regulation going on here; this is regulation of manner.