It's a case that their publishers or commissioners might care about. And their readers. And certainly older authors
I don't care. Too bad for them. Anyone could die at any time. If they don't publish anything because of that, then they can just vanish. If older authors do not want to take risks then I don't think they should be doing much of anything.
So if you pay a designer to design you a website, or write you some marketing literature, then you don't care that those things could become public domain if he dies next week, but remain yours for much longer if he lives? This seems unreasonable. It's creating a new, synthetic and essentially pointless additional risk for you to bear with no real advantage. It'd be much more sensible to make the copyright term predictable. You could have the same average copyright term - a fixed one, say - and yet have greater incentives for the creation of works because that additional risk is not there. Your scheme is simply inefficient: there could be greater benefits for the same costs if it were designed differently.
Why is it relevant?
It is to me. I think essentially paying an employee's family years after the employee's death through the use of artificial scarcity is idiotic.
And unless either of us poll every creator in existence (and somehow determine if they're lying or not), whether it truly plays a large role in them creating anything will likely remain a mystery.
Whereas you seem to have no problem paying an investor's family years after the investor's death through his shareholder's right to share in profits. I don't see why 'idiotic', either. There's a clear rationale: the creation of appropriate incentives for works to be created for the overall benefit of everyone, not just by authors hoping for a return for their children but also by authors being paid a salary by a commissioning company who goes on to recoup that salary cost over a period of time which includes time after his death.
So if an author is paid a salary by an investor who makes his return later through copyright and then saves that salary he should not be allowed to bequeath it to his children?
If the children didn't make anything, then yes.
Presumably, then, you're against all forms of bequest? And, by logical extension, gift? Or is it only people who earn their salary through writing who should not be able to bequeath and people who, say, make fridges should be treated differently? Though you'd have a seriously hard time dividing up the money in to heritable and non-heritable pools if you did think that.
he shouldn't be allowed to pass his company on to his children
The company? Maybe. The copyright for the books? Unless they created the books, then I don't think so.
So if I pay someone else a salary to write a book then I should be able to pass on the income from the copyright to my children when I die, but if I pay myself a salary to do so I should not? Unless I make them co-authors, of course. That'd be a logical step for older authors and completely neuter your proposal.
in the latter two cases older authors may not experience
The key word here is "may." We don't know that. I suspect most people just want to make some money like with every other job. Not only that, but old book authors writing books and planning to die soon afterwards is a very specific case that I don't care about.
It's a case that their publishers or commissioners might care about. And their readers. And certainly older authors, including those who are not 'planning to die' but just happen to have grown old. The case is important because your proposal puts drastically different incentives on younger and older authors and their publishers/commissioners, so OF COURSE the case is interesting.
There will always be some people who don't need the inducements of copyright protection (or of a particular period of protection) to produce works, and there will always be some who do. The law can't separate them. That's why it should set a term to balance all the costs - including limiting access to works - against its benefits - increased creation. One of those costs is unnecessary protection in some cases in order to provide necessary protection in others. Hence 'may'.
Yes, there may be authors who would prefer to make money like any other job. They don't get that choice. In theory a publisher could raise some money, pay the author a fixed wage, then use copyright to make a return which will cover the cost often enough to make them a profit (sometimes a huge one). The problems of moral hazard (authors not trying hard once they get the money anyway), disagreements over the value of the work and the publisher's uncertainty of the value of the authors work meant that this doesn't happen often with books. Although it does, of course, with software (and it seems absurd that a 70 year old programmer should be paid less because the value of his copyrights is lower - though IRL the term is decided differently for software, but the same absurdity arises with non-software).
So, normally, it's up to the author to raise the money to invest in it themselves - by saving and forgoing consumption while they write in order to make money later via the copyright.
And I'm fairly certain that most jobs don't give the employee's family money years after the employee's death.
No, except for some pension schemes which pay spouses. Why is it relevant? How does considering it help determine the optimum balance of dead-weight-loss vs incentive to create new works?
The author may not get paid writing the book, but the money the employee makes will dry up anyway and both of them will end up in the same situation.
At the very least, I don't think money should be given to those that didn't create anything or assist the author in any noticeable way.
So if an author is paid a salary by an investor who makes his return later through copyright and then saves that salary he should not be allowed to bequeath it to his children? That fits your definition. And if the investor commissions a book, makes money over time from the copyright and then dies he shouldn't be allowed to pass his company on to his children, even while the author remains alive? Or maybe you think that an outside investor should be privileged compared to a self-investing author?
Copyright serves many purposes and situations - and there aren't clear boundaries, so it may not be so easy to legally separate them.
Take a traditional work of literature - a published book. The author wishes to write it in the hope of receiving money. It may advance his career or he may have personal reason for writing it, or it may be purely professional, but whatever it is he's going to want some compensation, and some way of paying the bills. There may, or may not, be enough readers out there who, between them, will be prepared to pay enough. The author doesn't know whether or not there are. The publisher doesn't know. The readers don't know either.
Whatever price is chosen there will also be people who are prepared to pay less but would nonetheless be able to benefit. Economically, the ideal is that, if the sum of everything everyone is prepared to pay is greater, than the author is paid enough to induce him to write the book and then the book is distributed to everyone who can benefit for less than the maximum he is prepared to pay, possibly free. This isn't really possible in any practical economic system, so we have the fundamental dead-weight-loss vs incentive problem copyright has to solve in commercial contexts: to optimize the balance between access to published works and the incentive to create them.
There are two things which must be shared between publisher: the rewards and the risk. The publisher could pay the author a salary to write and take on all the risk himself. This is typical in software, for example, and in many other less artistic contexts. Or, the publisher and author could share the risk by taking a percentage each of sales. Or the author could take all the risk and pay the publisher to publish. The latter two may be the only way any sort of agreement between publisher and author can be reached because publisher and author may dispute the value of the work, or because the publisher isn't prepared to take on a risk he has much less influence over than the author. All three of these arrangements are common and copyright should support them all.
If copyright expires on the author's death there are two problems: in the latter two cases older authors may not experience incentives (you may have noticed that people/do/ like to leave something to their spouses, descendants or charities), and in the first two cases publishers may be less willing to pay the salary/publishing and promotion costs because they now also have to take on the risk of losing all returns as a result of the author's death. Not to mention that I'm sure the system could be comprehensively gamed using co-authors. I don't believe 70 years is necessary, but zero would be both costly (in terms of works not written) and inefficient (because the cost of a given level of reduction in works written could be borne in a way that has a greater improvement in access to works by not concentrating so much more on reducing the copyright term more for older authors than for younger ones).
Finally, think of other uses of copyright. Most copyright material is not published - it's personal correspondence, internal e-mail and so on. Copyright protection is still useful here. It isn't, IMO, appropriate for someone's personal correspondence to lose its protection instantly on death. A lot of it may contain personal information about people still living, or which relates to a business. Yes, information isn't directly subject to copyright, but in practice there's a big difference between making your own claims about what someone said and directly publishing what they'd written.
That's not true in many countries other than the US, such as in the EU, where there is a database right. Maybe not relevant for Canadian property adverts, unless they have a database right too, but perhaps for a whole lot else given that this is the Internet and you could be sued anywhere. Scraping a whole database full of property ads might well be illegal here even if you rewrite the text and get a five year old to draw artist's impressions of the houses. You could take a one or two, but not the whole thing.
It's down to Java's GC effectively hogging physical memory it doesn't really need. 1GB of firefox can cause fewer problems than 400MB of Java because most of that 1GB can be swapped out and left there. You won't see any problems until other applications need enough memory to force parts of Java to disk. I've got 2GB of RAM, and run Eclipse, a Java server, a Java client, apache and a web browser, so there are quite a few times when some of those get substantially swapped out while I'm using the others.
I get freezes with Eclipse and OpenJDK 7. Not just java, but to some extent the whole system becomes much less usable for 5-15s. Java is just fine as long as the JVM stays entirely in memory, but as soon as, say, a 1GB firefox [cough] process causes some rarely used bits of the Java process to be swapped out you get problems. The gc scans all of its memory, sucking in from disk all sorts of things Eclipse doesn't actually need right now and forcing other application's pages out to disk. Then the whole process repeats in reverse as your other application sucks everything back in. My system isn't well endowed with memory, but however much memory you have it's not good to have to waste it on making sure gc can scan something which isn't even being used.
OK so borrowing from overseas will prop up a currency temporarily. But that requires the lenders to do that actual something. "Sure we'll take that money of you and pay you 0% interest" doesn't seem like manipulation to me - it seems like the obvious thing to do if someone is dumb enough to make the offer.
Oh, I don't agree with AK Marc that the US government is manipulating it's currency, but I do think it's intentionally performing an action it knows it will alter its exchange rate but for other reasons.
Borrowing at 0% for current government spending which later has to be unwound isn't necessarily sensible. Shifting economic activity away from exports (and marginally cheaply importable goods) towards public sector spending and back again is costly. People find themselves having to switch career, companies have to disappear and be created, reputations and sales contracts have to be built up again, etc.
The actual things the US government (yeah, yeah the Fed is independent blah blah blah) does control completely: printing money and interest rate levers they've pushed way to the "push the currency down" side.
Interest rates will only have a temporary effect. Capital will move around to adjust quite quickly afterwards. If you're thinking of inflation when you mention printing money that's not really relevant; it's the real exchange rate that matters. The exchange rate will indeed fall, but theoretically only to keep the rate of exchange between domestic and foreign goods the same. It might be an effective partial default on the loans, though.
And I don't think it is possible for China to overpay for US assets. They are trading those dollars that are destined to be worthless (well worth much less than they are currently valued) for things that might not be.
They certainly can overpay - by buying companies at high prices. Western firms tend to pay less in takeovers than developing world buyers (according to my memory of something in The Economist recently). The eventual value of the nominal dollars they briefly hold between selling Yuan and buying the asset aren't really relevant.
[You don't need an EULA for using software] Since the copy is not a copy that is controlled by copyright.
It is here (the UK) under the Copyright, Designs and patents act, section 17(6): 'Copying in relation to any description of work includes the making of copies which are transient or are incidental to some other use of the work. '. This includes copying to memory. I don't know about the US.
There are other arguments that hold against the EULA:
1) You don't copy the software, the installer does, a program that is authorised by the copyright owner to do the copy
That's a bit like saying 'I didn't kill him, the gun did'. A tool, the computer, which is owned and being controlled by you successfully carries out the action you intended. It's you doing it. A copyright holder can't grant a licence to a program. A program isn't a legal person. He might imply through the intended behaviour of the program he supplies that he intends to grant a licence to you, but that isn't going to work if something adequately explicit says otherwise.
2) If they didn't want you to make a copy, then why do they insist on your making a copy (installing) before you're able to run the game? Consoles don't have to copy their disc contents to play. That they are forcing you to copy, it is an implicit agreement that you will make the copy
They DO want you to make a copy, that's why they grant you a licence via the EULA. You might get one implicitly during a sale if you aren't presented with it in advance and so not need the EULA as well, but as I originally said that might not work if you know their usual terms of business.
Imagine a country with balanced trade. When an importer imports goods it must swap some of its domestic currency for the foreign currency. When an exporter exports it must do the opposite (or its buyer must). Balanced trade means that every exported can find an importer with whom to perform this swap. In some senses foreign exchange is actually a literal swap of one bunch of goods for another. If imports start to rise then not all importers can find exporters with whom to swap currency so the domestic currency falls until it's back in balance. It's worth noticing that discouraging imports with tariffs or administrative barriers produces a corresponding fall in your own exports.
Now add cross-border borrowing and sale of assets to this. A country which borrows can temporarily import more than it exports in exchange for a promise of doing the opposite later. Suppose the government (but it could be, say, homeowners) starts to borrow and can't borrow everything it needs domestically (IIRC, at one point during the Bush administration US tax revenues were 16% of GDP, spending 21% and domestic saving 0.5% - the remainder must come from abroad). Importers no longer need to find an exporter to swap currencies, they can swap with government bond buyers instead with whom exporters must now compete in the currency markets. Every unit of currency borrowed is a unit of currency that does not - yet - have to be earned through exports. IOW, the exchange rate rises, domestic consumption can rise and domestic production for export can fall.
ie, the huge budget deficits of which you speak are part of the problem, albeit a result of ludicrous political incompetence and tax allergies rather than deliberate manipulation.
And how do you think China manipulates its exchange rate? It exchanges yuan for dollars and buys a lot of US government debt. ie, it lends to the US. It's also now buying US assets instead/as well, and will continue to do so (although it does tend to overpay). If the US had saved more domestically and borrowed less then China would have had fewer options for its newly bought dollars and would have had to pay much more for its investments. The economic cost to China of its intervention would be greater. It may also have spread it more widely around the world.
Unwinding all this isn't going to be pleasant in the US. The US will eventually need to stop borrowing so much, save more, and either default or begin to export more than it imports. That means that GDP will go up - more domestic production - but domestic consumption will not rise proportionately. Expect to be working more for less.
Your link doesn't claim that wealth inequality grew, it claims the income inequality grew (which is true for the US....IIRC within country inequality is mostly growing, worldwide inequality mostly falling). The share of income taken in return on capital (dividends and suchlike) has risen over 10 years in the US, and the share taken by labour has fallen. That can easily happen when, for example, corporate profits are increasing. I can't find an original source, but there's a graph here: http://www.frumforum.com/incredible-shrinking-workers-income
If you buy software over the counter then you'd expect to get an implied licence as part of the sale, just as with a CD, etc. An EULA in the packaging is then debatable - you may have a licence already and you don't need this new one to be allowed to use the software. However, it's not so simple....if you know that the EULA is the seller's usual terms of business then you may be held to it anyway. What the legal status of the EULA is if you don't I don't know for sure. Last I heard courts hadn't ruled on it properly, but I don't particularly follow such things.
If you're using a website then you need a copyright licence. The owner went to the trouble of making a public webserver serve the pages so there's some level of implied licence to copy the pages to your computer and display them, but that's going to be limited, probably fuzzy and probably isn't going to apply to anything within the site where the owner of the server has given you a clear message that he will only grant you a licence under different terms or that you aren't permitted to access the computer in that way at all. Putting licence terms on the site in a separate page to which you link would, I'd guess, have some effect on the licence terms but not be a free pass to negate the implied licence, but this is very much 'ask a lawyer' territory. Also, I presume it's a unilateral grant of a licence and not a contract with you and so they can't bind you to doing anything in particular, merely cause you to be breaching their copyright if you stray outside the terms.
Forcing you to go through a 'tick this box to agree before you can access (or buy)/download our software' page is quite clearly something which indicates there's no implied licence to use what's behind it. If you don't accept it then you have no other licence. You haven't bought the software in advance so there's no implied licence as in the first scenario. If you cause their web server to give you access to the software/service anyway, without clicking the 'I agree box' or after modifying the text of the licence and dumping it on their server in a way that obviously isn't expected, then you're obviously aware that the terms of the licence they've granted to you are what was in the original text. You know what this text is and that they only intend to give you access under it's conditions - there's no room for implied licences - and it's obvious you've seen it. If you're not buying something then it doesn't matter if you've agreed or not, they're granting you a limited licence and your agreement isn't necessary - if you stray outside it you're breaching their copyright. If you ARE buying something then there's a contract of sale, it's quite obvious what terms they've offered to you (the original text) and that you've accepted them (you paid).
Isn't the fact that the server is serving you the website a positive act? Especially considering that a number of websites rely on the fact that, by usage of the site, you are implicitly accepting the Terms of Use, I think its functionally identical. By them still serving the website to you, they have implicitly accepted your modifications to the terms from the Post.
They are not their computer, their computer is just a physical object that they happen to own with which you are interacting. You causing the computer to do something (serve the pages) is not the same thing as them performing an act. They have used this computer to communicate to you an offer: you may use this computer if you agree to these terms. Doing this was a positive act by them, performed by someone authorized to bind their company to the agreement. You have received this offer, then scrawled over it with a text editor. This has not changed what they have communicated to you, it's just changed what's on your screen. You perform an action you know will be interpreted as you responding 'I accept the agreement you have offered to me', whilst simultaneously putting that new text on to their property (their computer). You then proceed to use their computer.
You successfully causing their computer to perform an action which you know they didn't intend is not a positive act on their part. Whether you are considered to have accepted the original agreement or to have used their computer without permission I don't know, but what you certainly haven't got is agreement from someone entitled to legally bind its owner to your alternative TOS.
Certainly I have communicated the counteroffer -- I pressed the "I Accept" button, which I presume indicates the text of the offer which I am accepting.
To whom have you communicated the counteroffer? Why do you believe this person to be legally entitled to bind the seller? How has this person responded to indicate the seller's acceptance? In the case of a web service you may have put a copy of your counter offer on to their property somewhere (the web server), but I don't see how that's different to writing it down and randomly dropping it on the floor of their office. You haven't brought it to the attention of anyone appropriate, and the seller certainly hasn't responded with an acceptance.
They should adjust the behaviour of their pgm/website accordingly. I'm no Javaskript expert, but I presume they coded their website correctly, or at least that they cannot blame me for any mis-coding. No, I do not modify their JS.
You aren't interacting with the seller, you're interacting with a piece of machinery owned by the seller (in the case of a web site) or owned by you (in the case of a local installation). It's completely clear what offer the seller has made to you: you may use this IP/computer if you accept these conditions. The computer is merely a tool for communicating it to you, and likewise a tool for allowing you to communicate your acceptance. Subverting the tool does not change the offer. You know what offer has been communicated to you and you know what clicking 'accept' indicates.
What you're proposing to do is not so different to crossing out '$1' on a vending machine, writing in '$0.50', and then somehow using $0.50 to cause the mechanism to dispense something the seller clearly intended to sell for $1. You have not made a counteroffer, you have not communicated it to the seller and the seller has not accepted it. You have committed theft and criminal damage (or copyright infringement/unauthorized access to a computer for our original example....or, perhaps more likely, you've just accepted the original terms and not breached them).
But you still need a licence to, for example, copy software from installation media to hard disc, or hard disc to memory. In the UK, anyway. You could argue you got an implied one when you bought the software and don't need a second one - I've heard of that being a theoretical possibility but I have no idea if it has survived a court - but I believe you could still get caught out if you happen to already know the publishers usual terms of business.
IIRC (and IANAL) in the UK you're mostly right but it depends on who the person is. If the receptionist tries to sell you the building you shouldn't expect to end up owning it. It has to be someone you'd expect to be able to make the offer, based on job title, etc. I don't know where the dividing line is, but I do know to be very careful about the promises I make on behalf of employers...
Seller wants $50.
You instead hand the seller $40, but the seller still hands you the merchandise without comment. Looks like he accepted your counteroffer...
That may be true. But suppose you 'hand' a vending machine asking for $1, say, 20p instead, and through some flaw this triggers the mechanism which gives you some merchandise. You haven't offered the seller 20p and had the seller accept it because the seller isn't present and you're not interacting with the seller. You're interacting with a machine owned by the seller. It's obvious what offer the seller is making because they've set the machine up accordingly. It's obvious that you've removed the goods without the seller's permission.
The situation in TFA is analogous to this one, not an interaction with a human shop assistant. A human shop assistant is an agent of the seller and may be able to bind it to agreements. Machines are not.
As for legal standing, IANAL but AFAICS the modification is a counteroffer subject to acceptance. If the pgm installs or service runs, that sure looks like signs of acceptance.
However, you haven't communicated the counteroffer to the other party to the contract and they have not accepted it. The fact that you've nevertheless caused your/their computer to do what you want doesn't mean they've done so. You KNOW that they don't intend to grant permission to you to use their property without you agreeing to their offer, and you KNOW you haven't done that. Ludicrous sophistry designed to disguise this just isn't going to work. (You might, of course, have a better argument if you've paid for the software in advance, which is a rather different scenario).
For ordinary agreements you need offer (contractee) and acceptance (contractor), in a ToS acceptance and assent to the terms is implied by some form of conduct. TOSAmend seeks to make a unilateral contract (one to the world) bilateral (between parties) with no real chance or form of agreement. I believe it can be construed as an unaccepted counter offer. In such cases the method of communicating acceptance/rejection is important. Merely the act of making a counter-offer rejects the original offer ('destroying' it).
You aren't allowed to access someone's computer, or use their intellectual property, without their permission. If you haven't accepted the terms of service what gives you that permission? It could be implicit - I presume that putting a public website on a public webserver implies permission for people to fetch pages unless something about them makes it obvious that that's not what's intended. At this stage if you're still accessing the computer knowing that you've bypassed a technical measure designed to ensure only people who have been authorized via the TOS are using it it's not hard to imagine that this doesn't apply.
Website ToS are unilateral agreements.
That's a contradiction in terms. The website owner has indicated his agreement to the TOS by intentionally causing his web server to serve it to you, and then you accept or reject it. It has two parties; it's bilateral. What you mean is that they've offered you certain terms without providing you with any means to negotiate them.
Your acceptance is your participation on a website be it subscribing, visiting or checking a box that signs your soul away. The obvious basis is that you cannot accept an agreement you have not agreed, nor can someone accept an agreement you have not proposed - acceptance requires a positive act on behalf of the contractor. All in all this won't stand up in a real court... in a TOSAmend user's favour.
Acceptance might require a positive act, but the organization running the web server has not performed the positive act to accept your counter-proposal. All you've done is cause their computer to write your counter-proposal to a log file somewhere, if that. It can no more be considered accepted by them than if you'd written it on a piece of paper and dropped it on the floor in their office toilet and walked away. And you KNOW that they don't intend to give permission to you to use their computer to access whatever service it is without your agreement to the TOS, so you're now accessing a computer system without authorization. And that's probably illegal wherever it is you live.
BBC iPlayer uses AIR. I believe it's also sometimes used as a client-side for otherwise Java enterprise applications. It looks like it can compete well with Java WebStart's model for distributing applications, too.
Continuing without income means burning through cash which could otherwise be distributed to creditors. Unless that's somehow going to make things better for creditors that's unlikely to be allowed. If they either had some reasonable prospect of recovering their business, or had enough cash to pay all of their redundancy payments, all of the future payments on their long term contracts, etc. then they could have chosen to continue. If not, then it's quite possible (I don't know the local law) that they're required to appoint a liquidator who will share out what's left according to legal rules.
(Those legal rules seem to have a nasty habit of resulting in most of the money being shared out to.....the liquidator! But that's what you get when the system puts the liquidator in control of the company they're billing.)
Just as important, security is invisible. People who run businesses don't understand things they can't see, and certainly don't understand spending money on it.
Or, possibly, only understand spending money on it. We spent a lot of money on that TEMPEST protected room....doesn't that mean security is dealt with and we can stop worrying about it? It doesn't cost a lot of money to use a better password.
A company doesn't have to have no money today to be insolvent. I don't know Holland, but here in the UK your company will be insolvent if it knows it can't pay its bills as they come due, even if they're not due today. Any company will have long term contracts - to pay salaries/redundancy, to pay suppliers, etc. IANAL, but IIRC once insolvent, you have a duty to act in the best interest of your creditors (and not your shareholders) and not to treat any preferentially (pay your friend but not your employees, say). If continuing to trade means that the pot to pay claims from creditors is certain to only get smaller then doing so isn't in your creditors interest. You're also likely to find you'd have to preferentially pay some creditors, too, because some will be in more powerful positions than others.
The definitions, terms and rules will be different in different places, of course, but I doubt there are many well developed legal systems that will let you carry on pointlessly throwing away what cash you have left until you reach zero once bankruptcy is unavoidable.
A catch-all is fine if your domain isn't attractive to spammers to use for their outgoing mail.
I've found that once spammers start forging your domain and those forged e-mails start turning up in people's inboxes, other spammers then pick those sender addresses out of those inboxes and use them as targets for spam. Argh!
On a transactional level, an exchange is zero-sum. I sell you a share of acme at 34 dollars. I gain $34 dollars, and you lose $34 dollars. This is a zero-sum game.
Again, no. If you sell me one share of Acme at $34, then the right to consume $34-worth of stuff now passes from me to you, and the right to consume stuff in the future (depending on Acme's profits going off in to eternity) passes from you to me. We may value these things differently. The motivation for trading may well be that we value these differently....why else would we exchange them? For example, I may have different time preferences to you (eg, I'm in the middle of my career saving for retirement and you are retiring; or your house/one you're insuring has just fallen down and mine hasn't), or I may have different or changed risk preferences. If I value what I'm buying more than $34, and you value the $34 more than what I'm selling then it isn't zero sum.
Of course, sometimes information asymmetries, agency problems and the rest may mean that actually one of us is ripping off the other or a third party some, or even most, of the time - but without there being the possibility of mutually beneficial trade we'd know that this was always the case and always refuse to trade. In fact, being know to be a well informed trader can be to your disadvantage as it can lead to people refusing to trade with you.
Okay. I get what you are saying but pay attention here.
1) Alex buys a stock from Barry. Barry may be the holder of the stock or just represent a company but the money to purchase the stock goes to someone.
Yes
2) The payment for the stock is given on to Barry and simply represents the value of the stock at the moment of purchase. Bary now has Alex's money.
The money given to Barry represents the agreed price, and if mediated through an exchange is probably the market price. However, at a detailed level, notions of 'the market price' get a bit fuzzy. At any one time there will be various prices at which people are offering to sell various numbers of shares, and various prices at which they are offering to buy. There will be a gap between them (or they'd be matched and disappear). If you sell some number of shares in to this market then you may get several prices as your shares 'use up' the highest bid and the remainder get matched to the next highest bidder.
'Value' could be a synonym for 'price' here, but more logically could be its fundamental value. We're talking about a financial asset, so it can be said to have an objective fundamental value theoretically calculable from a probability and time weighted sum of all future payments to which its holder is entitled. This value is usually not know for sure and will differ from the market price. Also, for very large trades negotiated individually outside a market, the trade might not take place at the prices being offered/bid in the market before and after; and for some trades the existence of their trade may signal information which triggers other price movements.
3) The stock gains or loses value. These gains or losses do not effect the initial purchase. Alex's stock is worth more or less, but Barry still has the money used to purchase the stock.
Yes, the stock gains or loses value, but the value isn't known for sure and the changes may or may not be well correlated to market prices. The market price goes up and down, but Alex may not be able to sell his stock for the current market price depending on its size and who he is. Whilst it's very unlikely any single trade is going to change much, if, say, the buyer is Carl Icahn (an activist investor) the management may change their behaviour. Or if the buyer is Google and the seller is A Startup Founder and the price is $1bn, it might stimulate others to start new businesses in that area and encourage investors to invest in those kinds of new businesses rather than in other kinds of new businesses. Or if the new market price implies a yield of 20% it might cause the firms managers (in the possibly unlikely event they're not complete idiots) to cancel the plan to invest retained profits in that 5% return project and give them to shareholders instead. Or, more directly, it might cause the value of manager's options to vary and result in changes in behaviour that way.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a case that their publishers or commissioners might care about. And their readers. And certainly older authors
I don't care. Too bad for them. Anyone could die at any time. If they don't publish anything because of that, then they can just vanish. If older authors do not want to take risks then I don't think they should be doing much of anything.
So if you pay a designer to design you a website, or write you some marketing literature, then you don't care that those things could become public domain if he dies next week, but remain yours for much longer if he lives? This seems unreasonable. It's creating a new, synthetic and essentially pointless additional risk for you to bear with no real advantage. It'd be much more sensible to make the copyright term predictable. You could have the same average copyright term - a fixed one, say - and yet have greater incentives for the creation of works because that additional risk is not there. Your scheme is simply inefficient: there could be greater benefits for the same costs if it were designed differently.
Why is it relevant?
It is to me. I think essentially paying an employee's family years after the employee's death through the use of artificial scarcity is idiotic.
And unless either of us poll every creator in existence (and somehow determine if they're lying or not), whether it truly plays a large role in them creating anything will likely remain a mystery.
Whereas you seem to have no problem paying an investor's family years after the investor's death through his shareholder's right to share in profits. I don't see why 'idiotic', either. There's a clear rationale: the creation of appropriate incentives for works to be created for the overall benefit of everyone, not just by authors hoping for a return for their children but also by authors being paid a salary by a commissioning company who goes on to recoup that salary cost over a period of time which includes time after his death.
So if an author is paid a salary by an investor who makes his return later through copyright and then saves that salary he should not be allowed to bequeath it to his children?
If the children didn't make anything, then yes.
Presumably, then, you're against all forms of bequest? And, by logical extension, gift? Or is it only people who earn their salary through writing who should not be able to bequeath and people who, say, make fridges should be treated differently? Though you'd have a seriously hard time dividing up the money in to heritable and non-heritable pools if you did think that.
he shouldn't be allowed to pass his company on to his children
The company? Maybe. The copyright for the books? Unless they created the books, then I don't think so.
So if I pay someone else a salary to write a book then I should be able to pass on the income from the copyright to my children when I die, but if I pay myself a salary to do so I should not? Unless I make them co-authors, of course. That'd be a logical step for older authors and completely neuter your proposal.
in the latter two cases older authors may not experience
The key word here is "may." We don't know that. I suspect most people just want to make some money like with every other job. Not only that, but old book authors writing books and planning to die soon afterwards is a very specific case that I don't care about.
It's a case that their publishers or commissioners might care about. And their readers. And certainly older authors, including those who are not 'planning to die' but just happen to have grown old. The case is important because your proposal puts drastically different incentives on younger and older authors and their publishers/commissioners, so OF COURSE the case is interesting.
There will always be some people who don't need the inducements of copyright protection (or of a particular period of protection) to produce works, and there will always be some who do. The law can't separate them. That's why it should set a term to balance all the costs - including limiting access to works - against its benefits - increased creation. One of those costs is unnecessary protection in some cases in order to provide necessary protection in others. Hence 'may'.
Yes, there may be authors who would prefer to make money like any other job. They don't get that choice. In theory a publisher could raise some money, pay the author a fixed wage, then use copyright to make a return which will cover the cost often enough to make them a profit (sometimes a huge one). The problems of moral hazard (authors not trying hard once they get the money anyway), disagreements over the value of the work and the publisher's uncertainty of the value of the authors work meant that this doesn't happen often with books. Although it does, of course, with software (and it seems absurd that a 70 year old programmer should be paid less because the value of his copyrights is lower - though IRL the term is decided differently for software, but the same absurdity arises with non-software).
So, normally, it's up to the author to raise the money to invest in it themselves - by saving and forgoing consumption while they write in order to make money later via the copyright.
And I'm fairly certain that most jobs don't give the employee's family money years after the employee's death.
No, except for some pension schemes which pay spouses. Why is it relevant? How does considering it help determine the optimum balance of dead-weight-loss vs incentive to create new works?
The author may not get paid writing the book, but the money the employee makes will dry up anyway and both of them will end up in the same situation.
At the very least, I don't think money should be given to those that didn't create anything or assist the author in any noticeable way.
So if an author is paid a salary by an investor who makes his return later through copyright and then saves that salary he should not be allowed to bequeath it to his children? That fits your definition. And if the investor commissions a book, makes money over time from the copyright and then dies he shouldn't be allowed to pass his company on to his children, even while the author remains alive? Or maybe you think that an outside investor should be privileged compared to a self-investing author?
Copyright serves many purposes and situations - and there aren't clear boundaries, so it may not be so easy to legally separate them.
Take a traditional work of literature - a published book. The author wishes to write it in the hope of receiving money. It may advance his career or he may have personal reason for writing it, or it may be purely professional, but whatever it is he's going to want some compensation, and some way of paying the bills. There may, or may not, be enough readers out there who, between them, will be prepared to pay enough. The author doesn't know whether or not there are. The publisher doesn't know. The readers don't know either.
Whatever price is chosen there will also be people who are prepared to pay less but would nonetheless be able to benefit. Economically, the ideal is that, if the sum of everything everyone is prepared to pay is greater, than the author is paid enough to induce him to write the book and then the book is distributed to everyone who can benefit for less than the maximum he is prepared to pay, possibly free. This isn't really possible in any practical economic system, so we have the fundamental dead-weight-loss vs incentive problem copyright has to solve in commercial contexts: to optimize the balance between access to published works and the incentive to create them.
There are two things which must be shared between publisher: the rewards and the risk. The publisher could pay the author a salary to write and take on all the risk himself. This is typical in software, for example, and in many other less artistic contexts. Or, the publisher and author could share the risk by taking a percentage each of sales. Or the author could take all the risk and pay the publisher to publish. The latter two may be the only way any sort of agreement between publisher and author can be reached because publisher and author may dispute the value of the work, or because the publisher isn't prepared to take on a risk he has much less influence over than the author. All three of these arrangements are common and copyright should support them all.
If copyright expires on the author's death there are two problems: in the latter two cases older authors may not experience incentives (you may have noticed that people /do/ like to leave something to their spouses, descendants or charities), and in the first two cases publishers may be less willing to pay the salary/publishing and promotion costs because they now also have to take on the risk of losing all returns as a result of the author's death. Not to mention that I'm sure the system could be comprehensively gamed using co-authors. I don't believe 70 years is necessary, but zero would be both costly (in terms of works not written) and inefficient (because the cost of a given level of reduction in works written could be borne in a way that has a greater improvement in access to works by not concentrating so much more on reducing the copyright term more for older authors than for younger ones).
Finally, think of other uses of copyright. Most copyright material is not published - it's personal correspondence, internal e-mail and so on. Copyright protection is still useful here. It isn't, IMO, appropriate for someone's personal correspondence to lose its protection instantly on death. A lot of it may contain personal information about people still living, or which relates to a business. Yes, information isn't directly subject to copyright, but in practice there's a big difference between making your own claims about what someone said and directly publishing what they'd written.
That's not true in many countries other than the US, such as in the EU, where there is a database right. Maybe not relevant for Canadian property adverts, unless they have a database right too, but perhaps for a whole lot else given that this is the Internet and you could be sued anywhere. Scraping a whole database full of property ads might well be illegal here even if you rewrite the text and get a five year old to draw artist's impressions of the houses. You could take a one or two, but not the whole thing.
It's down to Java's GC effectively hogging physical memory it doesn't really need. 1GB of firefox can cause fewer problems than 400MB of Java because most of that 1GB can be swapped out and left there. You won't see any problems until other applications need enough memory to force parts of Java to disk. I've got 2GB of RAM, and run Eclipse, a Java server, a Java client, apache and a web browser, so there are quite a few times when some of those get substantially swapped out while I'm using the others.
I get freezes with Eclipse and OpenJDK 7. Not just java, but to some extent the whole system becomes much less usable for 5-15s. Java is just fine as long as the JVM stays entirely in memory, but as soon as, say, a 1GB firefox [cough] process causes some rarely used bits of the Java process to be swapped out you get problems. The gc scans all of its memory, sucking in from disk all sorts of things Eclipse doesn't actually need right now and forcing other application's pages out to disk. Then the whole process repeats in reverse as your other application sucks everything back in. My system isn't well endowed with memory, but however much memory you have it's not good to have to waste it on making sure gc can scan something which isn't even being used.
OK so borrowing from overseas will prop up a currency temporarily. But that requires the lenders to do that actual something. "Sure we'll take that money of you and pay you 0% interest" doesn't seem like manipulation to me - it seems like the obvious thing to do if someone is dumb enough to make the offer.
Oh, I don't agree with AK Marc that the US government is manipulating it's currency, but I do think it's intentionally performing an action it knows it will alter its exchange rate but for other reasons.
Borrowing at 0% for current government spending which later has to be unwound isn't necessarily sensible. Shifting economic activity away from exports (and marginally cheaply importable goods) towards public sector spending and back again is costly. People find themselves having to switch career, companies have to disappear and be created, reputations and sales contracts have to be built up again, etc.
The actual things the US government (yeah, yeah the Fed is independent blah blah blah) does control completely: printing money and interest rate levers they've pushed way to the "push the currency down" side.
Interest rates will only have a temporary effect. Capital will move around to adjust quite quickly afterwards. If you're thinking of inflation when you mention printing money that's not really relevant; it's the real exchange rate that matters. The exchange rate will indeed fall, but theoretically only to keep the rate of exchange between domestic and foreign goods the same. It might be an effective partial default on the loans, though.
And I don't think it is possible for China to overpay for US assets. They are trading those dollars that are destined to be worthless (well worth much less than they are currently valued) for things that might not be.
They certainly can overpay - by buying companies at high prices. Western firms tend to pay less in takeovers than developing world buyers (according to my memory of something in The Economist recently). The eventual value of the nominal dollars they briefly hold between selling Yuan and buying the asset aren't really relevant.
[You don't need an EULA for using software] Since the copy is not a copy that is controlled by copyright.
It is here (the UK) under the Copyright, Designs and patents act, section 17(6): 'Copying in relation to any description of work includes the making of copies which are transient or are incidental to some other use of the work. '. This includes copying to memory. I don't know about the US.
There are other arguments that hold against the EULA:
1) You don't copy the software, the installer does, a program that is authorised by the copyright owner to do the copy
That's a bit like saying 'I didn't kill him, the gun did'. A tool, the computer, which is owned and being controlled by you successfully carries out the action you intended. It's you doing it. A copyright holder can't grant a licence to a program. A program isn't a legal person. He might imply through the intended behaviour of the program he supplies that he intends to grant a licence to you, but that isn't going to work if something adequately explicit says otherwise.
2) If they didn't want you to make a copy, then why do they insist on your making a copy (installing) before you're able to run the game? Consoles don't have to copy their disc contents to play. That they are forcing you to copy, it is an implicit agreement that you will make the copy
They DO want you to make a copy, that's why they grant you a licence via the EULA. You might get one implicitly during a sale if you aren't presented with it in advance and so not need the EULA as well, but as I originally said that might not work if you know their usual terms of business.
Imagine a country with balanced trade. When an importer imports goods it must swap some of its domestic currency for the foreign currency. When an exporter exports it must do the opposite (or its buyer must). Balanced trade means that every exported can find an importer with whom to perform this swap. In some senses foreign exchange is actually a literal swap of one bunch of goods for another. If imports start to rise then not all importers can find exporters with whom to swap currency so the domestic currency falls until it's back in balance. It's worth noticing that discouraging imports with tariffs or administrative barriers produces a corresponding fall in your own exports.
Now add cross-border borrowing and sale of assets to this. A country which borrows can temporarily import more than it exports in exchange for a promise of doing the opposite later. Suppose the government (but it could be, say, homeowners) starts to borrow and can't borrow everything it needs domestically (IIRC, at one point during the Bush administration US tax revenues were 16% of GDP, spending 21% and domestic saving 0.5% - the remainder must come from abroad). Importers no longer need to find an exporter to swap currencies, they can swap with government bond buyers instead with whom exporters must now compete in the currency markets. Every unit of currency borrowed is a unit of currency that does not - yet - have to be earned through exports. IOW, the exchange rate rises, domestic consumption can rise and domestic production for export can fall.
ie, the huge budget deficits of which you speak are part of the problem, albeit a result of ludicrous political incompetence and tax allergies rather than deliberate manipulation.
And how do you think China manipulates its exchange rate? It exchanges yuan for dollars and buys a lot of US government debt. ie, it lends to the US. It's also now buying US assets instead/as well, and will continue to do so (although it does tend to overpay). If the US had saved more domestically and borrowed less then China would have had fewer options for its newly bought dollars and would have had to pay much more for its investments. The economic cost to China of its intervention would be greater. It may also have spread it more widely around the world.
Unwinding all this isn't going to be pleasant in the US. The US will eventually need to stop borrowing so much, save more, and either default or begin to export more than it imports. That means that GDP will go up - more domestic production - but domestic consumption will not rise proportionately. Expect to be working more for less.
Your link doesn't claim that wealth inequality grew, it claims the income inequality grew (which is true for the US....IIRC within country inequality is mostly growing, worldwide inequality mostly falling). The share of income taken in return on capital (dividends and suchlike) has risen over 10 years in the US, and the share taken by labour has fallen. That can easily happen when, for example, corporate profits are increasing. I can't find an original source, but there's a graph here: http://www.frumforum.com/incredible-shrinking-workers-income
You're possibly mixing several scenarios.
If you buy software over the counter then you'd expect to get an implied licence as part of the sale, just as with a CD, etc. An EULA in the packaging is then debatable - you may have a licence already and you don't need this new one to be allowed to use the software. However, it's not so simple....if you know that the EULA is the seller's usual terms of business then you may be held to it anyway. What the legal status of the EULA is if you don't I don't know for sure. Last I heard courts hadn't ruled on it properly, but I don't particularly follow such things.
If you're using a website then you need a copyright licence. The owner went to the trouble of making a public webserver serve the pages so there's some level of implied licence to copy the pages to your computer and display them, but that's going to be limited, probably fuzzy and probably isn't going to apply to anything within the site where the owner of the server has given you a clear message that he will only grant you a licence under different terms or that you aren't permitted to access the computer in that way at all. Putting licence terms on the site in a separate page to which you link would, I'd guess, have some effect on the licence terms but not be a free pass to negate the implied licence, but this is very much 'ask a lawyer' territory. Also, I presume it's a unilateral grant of a licence and not a contract with you and so they can't bind you to doing anything in particular, merely cause you to be breaching their copyright if you stray outside the terms.
Forcing you to go through a 'tick this box to agree before you can access (or buy) /download our software' page is quite clearly something which indicates there's no implied licence to use what's behind it. If you don't accept it then you have no other licence. You haven't bought the software in advance so there's no implied licence as in the first scenario. If you cause their web server to give you access to the software/service anyway, without clicking the 'I agree box' or after modifying the text of the licence and dumping it on their server in a way that obviously isn't expected, then you're obviously aware that the terms of the licence they've granted to you are what was in the original text. You know what this text is and that they only intend to give you access under it's conditions - there's no room for implied licences - and it's obvious you've seen it. If you're not buying something then it doesn't matter if you've agreed or not, they're granting you a limited licence and your agreement isn't necessary - if you stray outside it you're breaching their copyright. If you ARE buying something then there's a contract of sale, it's quite obvious what terms they've offered to you (the original text) and that you've accepted them (you paid).
Isn't the fact that the server is serving you the website a positive act? Especially considering that a number of websites rely on the fact that, by usage of the site, you are implicitly accepting the Terms of Use, I think its functionally identical. By them still serving the website to you, they have implicitly accepted your modifications to the terms from the Post.
They are not their computer, their computer is just a physical object that they happen to own with which you are interacting. You causing the computer to do something (serve the pages) is not the same thing as them performing an act. They have used this computer to communicate to you an offer: you may use this computer if you agree to these terms. Doing this was a positive act by them, performed by someone authorized to bind their company to the agreement. You have received this offer, then scrawled over it with a text editor. This has not changed what they have communicated to you, it's just changed what's on your screen. You perform an action you know will be interpreted as you responding 'I accept the agreement you have offered to me', whilst simultaneously putting that new text on to their property (their computer). You then proceed to use their computer.
You successfully causing their computer to perform an action which you know they didn't intend is not a positive act on their part. Whether you are considered to have accepted the original agreement or to have used their computer without permission I don't know, but what you certainly haven't got is agreement from someone entitled to legally bind its owner to your alternative TOS.
Certainly I have communicated the counteroffer -- I pressed the "I Accept" button, which I presume indicates the text of the offer which I am accepting.
To whom have you communicated the counteroffer? Why do you believe this person to be legally entitled to bind the seller? How has this person responded to indicate the seller's acceptance? In the case of a web service you may have put a copy of your counter offer on to their property somewhere (the web server), but I don't see how that's different to writing it down and randomly dropping it on the floor of their office. You haven't brought it to the attention of anyone appropriate, and the seller certainly hasn't responded with an acceptance.
They should adjust the behaviour of their pgm/website accordingly. I'm no Javaskript expert, but I presume they coded their website correctly, or at least that they cannot blame me for any mis-coding. No, I do not modify their JS.
You aren't interacting with the seller, you're interacting with a piece of machinery owned by the seller (in the case of a web site) or owned by you (in the case of a local installation). It's completely clear what offer the seller has made to you: you may use this IP/computer if you accept these conditions. The computer is merely a tool for communicating it to you, and likewise a tool for allowing you to communicate your acceptance. Subverting the tool does not change the offer. You know what offer has been communicated to you and you know what clicking 'accept' indicates.
What you're proposing to do is not so different to crossing out '$1' on a vending machine, writing in '$0.50', and then somehow using $0.50 to cause the mechanism to dispense something the seller clearly intended to sell for $1. You have not made a counteroffer, you have not communicated it to the seller and the seller has not accepted it. You have committed theft and criminal damage (or copyright infringement/unauthorized access to a computer for our original example....or, perhaps more likely, you've just accepted the original terms and not breached them).
But you still need a licence to, for example, copy software from installation media to hard disc, or hard disc to memory. In the UK, anyway. You could argue you got an implied one when you bought the software and don't need a second one - I've heard of that being a theoretical possibility but I have no idea if it has survived a court - but I believe you could still get caught out if you happen to already know the publishers usual terms of business.
IIRC (and IANAL) in the UK you're mostly right but it depends on who the person is. If the receptionist tries to sell you the building you shouldn't expect to end up owning it. It has to be someone you'd expect to be able to make the offer, based on job title, etc. I don't know where the dividing line is, but I do know to be very careful about the promises I make on behalf of employers...
Seller wants $50. You instead hand the seller $40, but the seller still hands you the merchandise without comment. Looks like he accepted your counteroffer...
That may be true. But suppose you 'hand' a vending machine asking for $1, say, 20p instead, and through some flaw this triggers the mechanism which gives you some merchandise. You haven't offered the seller 20p and had the seller accept it because the seller isn't present and you're not interacting with the seller. You're interacting with a machine owned by the seller. It's obvious what offer the seller is making because they've set the machine up accordingly. It's obvious that you've removed the goods without the seller's permission.
The situation in TFA is analogous to this one, not an interaction with a human shop assistant. A human shop assistant is an agent of the seller and may be able to bind it to agreements. Machines are not.
As for legal standing, IANAL but AFAICS the modification is a counteroffer subject to acceptance. If the pgm installs or service runs, that sure looks like signs of acceptance.
However, you haven't communicated the counteroffer to the other party to the contract and they have not accepted it. The fact that you've nevertheless caused your/their computer to do what you want doesn't mean they've done so. You KNOW that they don't intend to grant permission to you to use their property without you agreeing to their offer, and you KNOW you haven't done that. Ludicrous sophistry designed to disguise this just isn't going to work. (You might, of course, have a better argument if you've paid for the software in advance, which is a rather different scenario).
The OP is right... but it's interesting.
For ordinary agreements you need offer (contractee) and acceptance (contractor), in a ToS acceptance and assent to the terms is implied by some form of conduct. TOSAmend seeks to make a unilateral contract (one to the world) bilateral (between parties) with no real chance or form of agreement. I believe it can be construed as an unaccepted counter offer. In such cases the method of communicating acceptance/rejection is important. Merely the act of making a counter-offer rejects the original offer ('destroying' it).
You aren't allowed to access someone's computer, or use their intellectual property, without their permission. If you haven't accepted the terms of service what gives you that permission? It could be implicit - I presume that putting a public website on a public webserver implies permission for people to fetch pages unless something about them makes it obvious that that's not what's intended. At this stage if you're still accessing the computer knowing that you've bypassed a technical measure designed to ensure only people who have been authorized via the TOS are using it it's not hard to imagine that this doesn't apply.
Website ToS are unilateral agreements.
That's a contradiction in terms. The website owner has indicated his agreement to the TOS by intentionally causing his web server to serve it to you, and then you accept or reject it. It has two parties; it's bilateral. What you mean is that they've offered you certain terms without providing you with any means to negotiate them.
Your acceptance is your participation on a website be it subscribing, visiting or checking a box that signs your soul away. The obvious basis is that you cannot accept an agreement you have not agreed, nor can someone accept an agreement you have not proposed - acceptance requires a positive act on behalf of the contractor. All in all this won't stand up in a real court... in a TOSAmend user's favour.
Acceptance might require a positive act, but the organization running the web server has not performed the positive act to accept your counter-proposal. All you've done is cause their computer to write your counter-proposal to a log file somewhere, if that. It can no more be considered accepted by them than if you'd written it on a piece of paper and dropped it on the floor in their office toilet and walked away. And you KNOW that they don't intend to give permission to you to use their computer to access whatever service it is without your agreement to the TOS, so you're now accessing a computer system without authorization. And that's probably illegal wherever it is you live.
BBC iPlayer uses AIR. I believe it's also sometimes used as a client-side for otherwise Java enterprise applications. It looks like it can compete well with Java WebStart's model for distributing applications, too.
Continuing without income means burning through cash which could otherwise be distributed to creditors. Unless that's somehow going to make things better for creditors that's unlikely to be allowed. If they either had some reasonable prospect of recovering their business, or had enough cash to pay all of their redundancy payments, all of the future payments on their long term contracts, etc. then they could have chosen to continue. If not, then it's quite possible (I don't know the local law) that they're required to appoint a liquidator who will share out what's left according to legal rules.
(Those legal rules seem to have a nasty habit of resulting in most of the money being shared out to.....the liquidator! But that's what you get when the system puts the liquidator in control of the company they're billing.)
Just as important, security is invisible. People who run businesses don't understand things they can't see, and certainly don't understand spending money on it.
Or, possibly, only understand spending money on it. We spent a lot of money on that TEMPEST protected room....doesn't that mean security is dealt with and we can stop worrying about it? It doesn't cost a lot of money to use a better password.
A company doesn't have to have no money today to be insolvent. I don't know Holland, but here in the UK your company will be insolvent if it knows it can't pay its bills as they come due, even if they're not due today. Any company will have long term contracts - to pay salaries/redundancy, to pay suppliers, etc. IANAL, but IIRC once insolvent, you have a duty to act in the best interest of your creditors (and not your shareholders) and not to treat any preferentially (pay your friend but not your employees, say). If continuing to trade means that the pot to pay claims from creditors is certain to only get smaller then doing so isn't in your creditors interest. You're also likely to find you'd have to preferentially pay some creditors, too, because some will be in more powerful positions than others.
The definitions, terms and rules will be different in different places, of course, but I doubt there are many well developed legal systems that will let you carry on pointlessly throwing away what cash you have left until you reach zero once bankruptcy is unavoidable.
A catch-all is fine if your domain isn't attractive to spammers to use for their outgoing mail.
I've found that once spammers start forging your domain and those forged e-mails start turning up in people's inboxes, other spammers then pick those sender addresses out of those inboxes and use them as targets for spam. Argh!
On a transactional level, an exchange is zero-sum. I sell you a share of acme at 34 dollars. I gain $34 dollars, and you lose $34 dollars. This is a zero-sum game.
Again, no. If you sell me one share of Acme at $34, then the right to consume $34-worth of stuff now passes from me to you, and the right to consume stuff in the future (depending on Acme's profits going off in to eternity) passes from you to me. We may value these things differently. The motivation for trading may well be that we value these differently....why else would we exchange them? For example, I may have different time preferences to you (eg, I'm in the middle of my career saving for retirement and you are retiring; or your house/one you're insuring has just fallen down and mine hasn't), or I may have different or changed risk preferences. If I value what I'm buying more than $34, and you value the $34 more than what I'm selling then it isn't zero sum.
Of course, sometimes information asymmetries, agency problems and the rest may mean that actually one of us is ripping off the other or a third party some, or even most, of the time - but without there being the possibility of mutually beneficial trade we'd know that this was always the case and always refuse to trade. In fact, being know to be a well informed trader can be to your disadvantage as it can lead to people refusing to trade with you.
Okay. I get what you are saying but pay attention here. 1) Alex buys a stock from Barry. Barry may be the holder of the stock or just represent a company but the money to purchase the stock goes to someone.
Yes
2) The payment for the stock is given on to Barry and simply represents the value of the stock at the moment of purchase. Bary now has Alex's money.
The money given to Barry represents the agreed price, and if mediated through an exchange is probably the market price. However, at a detailed level, notions of 'the market price' get a bit fuzzy. At any one time there will be various prices at which people are offering to sell various numbers of shares, and various prices at which they are offering to buy. There will be a gap between them (or they'd be matched and disappear). If you sell some number of shares in to this market then you may get several prices as your shares 'use up' the highest bid and the remainder get matched to the next highest bidder.
'Value' could be a synonym for 'price' here, but more logically could be its fundamental value. We're talking about a financial asset, so it can be said to have an objective fundamental value theoretically calculable from a probability and time weighted sum of all future payments to which its holder is entitled. This value is usually not know for sure and will differ from the market price. Also, for very large trades negotiated individually outside a market, the trade might not take place at the prices being offered/bid in the market before and after; and for some trades the existence of their trade may signal information which triggers other price movements.
3) The stock gains or loses value. These gains or losses do not effect the initial purchase. Alex's stock is worth more or less, but Barry still has the money used to purchase the stock.
Yes, the stock gains or loses value, but the value isn't known for sure and the changes may or may not be well correlated to market prices. The market price goes up and down, but Alex may not be able to sell his stock for the current market price depending on its size and who he is. Whilst it's very unlikely any single trade is going to change much, if, say, the buyer is Carl Icahn (an activist investor) the management may change their behaviour. Or if the buyer is Google and the seller is A Startup Founder and the price is $1bn, it might stimulate others to start new businesses in that area and encourage investors to invest in those kinds of new businesses rather than in other kinds of new businesses. Or if the new market price implies a yield of 20% it might cause the firms managers (in the possibly unlikely event they're not complete idiots) to cancel the plan to invest retained profits in that 5% return project and give them to shareholders instead. Or, more directly, it might cause the value of manager's options to vary and result in changes in behaviour that way.