If the RIAA is the one being directly issued subpoenas and executing the subpoenas, then are they not, in fact, and agent of the state and should be held accountable to the same standards?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: The subpoena power belongs to just about anybody in a civil dispute - just because you may have been given the authority by statute to examine third party records does not make you a government agency. You need to understand that the constitution was designed to define and limit the authority of the government, and it does not apply to anything other than the government. Thus, the rights we have enshrined in the constitution protect us from our own government, but do not protect us from each other. RIAA isn't a government agency. Their use or even abuse of the legal process may be illegal, but cannot be unconstitutional.
i wonder if previous settlements can be overturned if it's proven that RIAA used illegal means to track offenders. after all, incriminating evidence is regularly thrown out of the criminal courts if it was obtained by unlawful search and seizure, through illegal wire taps, botched confessions, etc.
Not really. The "exclusionary rule" that prohibits the admission of illegally obtained evidence doesn't apply to civil cases. The trigger of the exclusionary rule is a violation of a person's constitutional rights by a state actor (law enforcement authorities). RIAA is not a state actor.
This is, of course, complete rubbish. Its all about finding a way to ditch a free service that is costing them money and replace it with one they can charge for. This is sensible business practice from a money point of view, but the business model is more akin to drug pushing than online services.
And there's a problem with this, why?
Microsoft doesn't need to use online child predators as a justification for this move. There's no point to it, because it's not likely to convince anyone of its motives. The problems Microsoft stated with online chat are likely one of the reasons why they have changed their position.
The other reason is clearly profit, but, guess what, Microsoft is actually in it for the money. Their business model in IM and online chat rooms isn't all that different from many other software companies - give it away for free and build up a demand for it, then start charging. If consumers don't like it, they can go elsewhere.
MS does not have a monopoly in this, and they aren't doing anything illegal or morally suspect. Is it like drug pushing? Perhaps, but so was the freeware release of Doom's first mission, and many "public beta" tests, which are as much about marketing as they are about fine-tuning software.
I disagree on your theory that the ideal library system would be a free-text search.
A search engine, no matter how good it is, is no a replacement for a good index. I'm an attorney, and I've been dealing with Lexis for a few years. Maybe I'm not good enough at Lexis, but in my experience it's a pain in the neck. It's almost impossible to look up a statute on say, "intestate succession" without getting 100+ hits on statutes from almost every code in the State of California.
Search engines have their places - and a free-text library catalog search is a very good idea. But it should be viewed as an adjunct to an index and cataloging system and not as a replacement.
And if I wrote a program that exactly duplicated the functionality of Warcraft III (even if all the code was my own) do you think I wouldn't get sued by Blizzard?
I've worked with Blizzard's law firm before, The Law Offices of Zerg, Zerg, Zerg, Zerg, Zerg, Zerg, and Zerg.
It's a risk. If the artists try to unionize, the labels will likely dump many artists and replace them with emerging groups hungry for a record contract. But, if the major artists get together and form a strong economic block, they could carry the rest of the artists along with them. Such a union could establish by force a just, time-limited, standard recording contract that respects the rights of the artist.
Or, with enough money, they can make their own labels. As I understand it, this is how United Artists started. Back in the day, Hollywood was ruled by the studio system, in which actors were more or less owned by their studios in the same manner that recording artists are owned by labels today. United Artists, the Screen Actors Guild, and other groups helped break the studio system, and now actors are guaranteed compensation at a minimum rate under standard SAG contracts, and are also allowed to take their talent anywhere they want. There is no particular reason why recording artists cannot do this, especially when it's much less expensive to record an album than it is to produce a motion picture.
In a nutshell, I think what's happening is that people know enough (and have been let down enough) by technology to not have faith in the hypothetical futures described in sci-fi. Instead, these same people want an altruistic world like Tolkein offers (all is black or white, very little grey) that has the semblance of "history" or "religion", and doesn't require buying in to a specific school of futurism.
[comic_book_guy]I wouldn't charactorize any of Tolkien's works as being "black and white". I suppose that this could apply to The Lord of the Rings, to a limited extent. But did you forget that Boromir tried to steal the One Ring from Frodo? Did you not remember Bilbo trying to take the ring back from Frodo at Rivendell? And Tolkien's other works were certainly not examples of a naive black and white world view. The dragon Smaug was a mere footnot to the Hobbit, which concerned itself mostly with the conflict between Dwarves, Elves and Humans over Smaug's treasure. And you surely cannot forget the Elf-on-Elf warfare rampant throughout The Simarillion?[/comic_book_guy]
Teller didn't and shot off SEDAN, one of the dirtiest shots ever and the largest cratering experiment done at NTS.
I was able to visit the Nevada Test Site, and that very very large crater, in 1986 while I was Midshipman at the United States Naval Academy. I spent a month that summer at the Los Alamos nuclear lab and we took a trip the NTS just to check it out.
The hole was very impressive. I suppose it was more impressive that each of us had to wear personal dosimeters, and could stay outside of the bus for only 5 minutes or so. We also drove through a town designed to test the stability of various structures against nuclear blasts. It was fascinating to drive by proposed "nuke-proof" bomb shelters that were clearly damaged by a nuclear blast.
And the train-ride into the underground testing facility was fun too - it was sort of like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in more ways than one.
I think that you are underestimating the military capability of the Japanese at the end of the war. It's true that their naval and air forces were largely destroyed. It's also true that Japan was isolated from vital war materials.
It's also true that the Japanese resistance on Saipan, the first pre-war Japanese island invaded by the US, was so great that Japanese soldiers forced Japanese civilians to jump of cliffs to their deaths rather than suffer the indignity of falling under the occupation of the United States.
Furthermore, the ability of a people willing to spend their lives like water in resistence to an enemy cannot be underestimated. Consider Vietnam, for example. Also consider the tremendous resistance of the Japanese on Iwo Jima and other more or less worthless pieces of rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Consider the strident attitude of the North Koreans today - uncooperative despite rampant malnutrition. People don't give up so easily, even if they have no resources with which to fight.
The bottom line is that unless the United States was willing to accept a negotiated settlement to the war leaving the same clique that started war in power, rather than an unconditional surrender, more Japanese soldiers and civilians would have died had we not used the Atomic Bomb and had invaded Japan conventionally instead.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because they were largely untouched to that point and they had significant manufacturing and logistical facilities. They weren't just filled with helpless civilians
Actually Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely untouched by intention. These cities were deliberately preserved from allied bombings, along with Dresden and perhaps other German cities, for the purpose of having pristine targets onto which to drop the Atomic Bomb so we could determine with greater certainty the effects of nuclear weapons.
When the writing was on the wall and it was only a matter of time before the allied victory in Europe, we decided to bomb the hell out of Dresden, conventionally, more or less just to see what would happen. If the Nazis had held out longer, or if the Atomic Bomb was created sooner, Dresden would have been nuked.
However, I do agree with your point that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done for reasons other than impressing Josef Stalin and "scientific research". The anticipated casulties of the planned amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands were so great that the Atomic Bomb was used to shock Japan into unconditional surrender. The lesson to Japan in August, 1945 was this: You may continue fighting if you want, but if you do, we are just going to kill all of you with super weapons for which there is no defense whatsoever.
MS update downloaded the patch and it's already installed. It seems to me that hardly anyone is hearing about these bugs nowadays until after MS updates Windows. The lesson here (other than the obvious and silly "Don't use Windows") is to run MS update.
I can confirm this. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper died in 1992. She was the longest-serving officer is US Naval history (she even beat out Adm. Hyman Rickover, who developed the Navy's nuclear reactor program). Every year, for many years, Adm. Hopper would give a lecture to the plebes (freshmen) at the U.S. Naval Academy. I saw her speak there around 1984.
During her lecture, Adm. Hopper told us the story of the first computer bug. She also discussed COBOL. She also wrote the first complier in 1953. Let me say that again. She wrote the first complier.
She was a very wise person. Her motto was "It is always better to apologize than to ask permission". The idea being that if you have to seek approval for everything you do, you'll never get anything done at all. She also passed out lengths of copper wire, cut to the distance light travels in one nano-second. She was fantastic and inspirational and even though I'm not in the computer industry, I still feel a kinship towards her. She was a visionary, a pioneer, and a national treasure. And she had a hell of a sense of humor.
...is actually pretty simple: Boycott the Music Industry. It's all over-marketed crap anyway - the Madonna/Britney Spears kiss, for example, wasn't an artistic expression, it was a shock statement made to get people to watch the awards program and pay money to RIAA for the music manufactured by their neutered artists.
Stop stealing music. Stop buying music too. Support your local artists. Go to a local nightclub, watch the local bands, and happily pay the cover charge. Buy only CD's the performers sell themselves, and don't steal their music, because you'll be ripping of a performer, and not RIAA.
Your local garage band won't be a technically proficient, but they will be more honest and original, even if they are a cover band playing other peoples' music.
It is amnesty if RIAA releases them for liability for their past acts.
And why would RIAA (or anyone else) provide a blanket amnesty with no specifics? Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon an unconditional pardon in order to get the nation past Watergate, but it would have been better had the pardon been specific - Nixon's supporters wouldn't have been able to worm their way out of admitting Nixon's criminal liability for specific acts. All he had to do was to lay low for 20 years and come out "rested, tan and ready" and step into the shoes of an elder statesman.
What does this have to do with RIAA? They'd be as unwise as Ford was to issue a release from all claims without knowing what those claims of liability are.
Also, you need to understand a fundamental rule of contract law - A contract must be supported by "consideration", which is a bargained-for exchange. There has to be something going both ways. RIAA's forgiveness (whatever that's worth) is not binding at all unless RIAA receives something in return (admission of liability and promise not to do it again).
Stupid People who don't update their OS and Paranoid People who refuse to do so are responsible for one of the worst computer security outbreaks of the year.
I have a network of 16 computers. I've got an el-cheapo Linksys Firewall, and we download automatic updates. I've had absolutely no problems with MSBlast. None. Microsoft update, for those who ran it, fixed the problem weeks before the virus hit.
They need proof before assigning guilt, but only probably cause to get a warrant and arrest the guy. The statements that guy allegedly made are probably enough to get him arrested and get a search warrant issued for his computer, allowing for the weeks for computer forensics you speak of to take place.
As a complete aside, does XP have a means of allowing the system administrator to interrogate each computer on the network to see what updates have been installed?
That would be convenient. But the small paranoid man inside me also thinks that this may be another security vulnerability.
I absolutely agree with you. The USPTO is giving away too many patents to "inventors" who present ideas with no actual proof of concept. A good idea for patent reform would be to require patent applicants to actually deliver a working model of the invention to the USPTO - in the case of software patents, it would have to a compiled program that works the way the patent claims.
But that's not all. So many patents are sort of obvious (one-click shopping, for example). For some reason the USPTO considers that to be new "art", even though one-click shopping is just the software extension of a retailor keeping your billing information on file and automatically billing you for the products you purchase. There seem to be patents issued for software for "inventions" that merely impliment in software business practices that already exist in other forms in the real world.
If you want to test relative compiler technology, you use the fastest compiler for each platform. If you want to test the platform itself, you use software which is as close to identical between platforms as possible. Hence, gcc.
True, true, but who cares about relative compiler technology? The only benchmarck worth anything to the end user is real-life application performance.
Admittedly Macs aren't everyone's cup of tea, but finding fault with Apple because they actively develop their own operating systems (one of which is open source) is a bit like finding fault with your parents for actually raising you instead of putting you up for adoption when you were born.
What's the use of an open source OS when the hardware is completely closed-source and relies on a proprietary BIOS? Apple will be open source when I can build one all by myself using parts I can buy from someone other than Apple.
It occurs to me that the publisher doesn't have to disclose this spyware in the EULA.
Why?
Because even though the illegal user is agreeing to the EULA, he isn't really upholding it, by reason of his illegal use of illegally duplicated software. There's no contract because the illegal user's agreement to the EULA is completely fraudulent. Or at least, if there is a contract, the user is in breach of the contract as soon as he agrees to it, and the publisher is therefore not bound by the contract either.
It's really quite ironic that many here are demanding the software publishers "play fair" with copyright violators. I find myself going so far as to support software that encrypts the illegal user's registry files and pops up a box that says "If you don't want to lose all your data, uninstall program X by clicking here or enter your credit card number."
Hell, it's still less annoying that that damn blinkin real audio icon in the XP toolbar that I can't get rid of.
Slashdot Mirror
Pluto is smaller than seven of the solar system's moon according to here( Moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan and Triton) and its a planet.
Pluto is small than many moons but it's still a planet, if only because it has a Sailor Senshi assigned to it.
If the RIAA is the one being directly issued subpoenas and executing the subpoenas, then are they not, in fact, and agent of the state and should be held accountable to the same standards?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: The subpoena power belongs to just about anybody in a civil dispute - just because you may have been given the authority by statute to examine third party records does not make you a government agency. You need to understand that the constitution was designed to define and limit the authority of the government, and it does not apply to anything other than the government. Thus, the rights we have enshrined in the constitution protect us from our own government, but do not protect us from each other. RIAA isn't a government agency. Their use or even abuse of the legal process may be illegal, but cannot be unconstitutional.
i wonder if previous settlements can be overturned if it's proven that RIAA used illegal means to track offenders. after all, incriminating evidence is regularly thrown out of the criminal courts if it was obtained by unlawful search and seizure, through illegal wire taps, botched confessions, etc.
Not really. The "exclusionary rule" that prohibits the admission of illegally obtained evidence doesn't apply to civil cases. The trigger of the exclusionary rule is a violation of a person's constitutional rights by a state actor (law enforcement authorities). RIAA is not a state actor.
This is, of course, complete rubbish. Its all about finding a way to ditch a free service that is costing them money and replace it with one they can charge for. This is sensible business practice from a money point of view, but the business model is more akin to drug pushing than online services.
And there's a problem with this, why?
Microsoft doesn't need to use online child predators as a justification for this move. There's no point to it, because it's not likely to convince anyone of its motives. The problems Microsoft stated with online chat are likely one of the reasons why they have changed their position.
The other reason is clearly profit, but, guess what, Microsoft is actually in it for the money. Their business model in IM and online chat rooms isn't all that different from many other software companies - give it away for free and build up a demand for it, then start charging. If consumers don't like it, they can go elsewhere.
MS does not have a monopoly in this, and they aren't doing anything illegal or morally suspect. Is it like drug pushing? Perhaps, but so was the freeware release of Doom's first mission, and many "public beta" tests, which are as much about marketing as they are about fine-tuning software.
I disagree on your theory that the ideal library system would be a free-text search.
A search engine, no matter how good it is, is no a replacement for a good index. I'm an attorney, and I've been dealing with Lexis for a few years. Maybe I'm not good enough at Lexis, but in my experience it's a pain in the neck. It's almost impossible to look up a statute on say, "intestate succession" without getting 100+ hits on statutes from almost every code in the State of California.
Search engines have their places - and a free-text library catalog search is a very good idea. But it should be viewed as an adjunct to an index and cataloging system and not as a replacement.
And if I wrote a program that exactly duplicated the functionality of Warcraft III (even if all the code was my own) do you think I wouldn't get sued by Blizzard?
I've worked with Blizzard's law firm before, The Law Offices of Zerg, Zerg, Zerg, Zerg, Zerg, Zerg, and Zerg.
It's a risk. If the artists try to unionize, the labels will likely dump many artists and replace them with emerging groups hungry for a record contract. But, if the major artists get together and form a strong economic block, they could carry the rest of the artists along with them. Such a union could establish by force a just, time-limited, standard recording contract that respects the rights of the artist.
Or, with enough money, they can make their own labels. As I understand it, this is how United Artists started. Back in the day, Hollywood was ruled by the studio system, in which actors were more or less owned by their studios in the same manner that recording artists are owned by labels today. United Artists, the Screen Actors Guild, and other groups helped break the studio system, and now actors are guaranteed compensation at a minimum rate under standard SAG contracts, and are also allowed to take their talent anywhere they want. There is no particular reason why recording artists cannot do this, especially when it's much less expensive to record an album than it is to produce a motion picture.
In a nutshell, I think what's happening is that people know enough (and have been let down enough) by technology to not have faith in the hypothetical futures described in sci-fi. Instead, these same people want an altruistic world like Tolkein offers (all is black or white, very little grey) that has the semblance of "history" or "religion", and doesn't require buying in to a specific school of futurism.
[comic_book_guy]I wouldn't charactorize any of Tolkien's works as being "black and white". I suppose that this could apply to The Lord of the Rings, to a limited extent. But did you forget that Boromir tried to steal the One Ring from Frodo? Did you not remember Bilbo trying to take the ring back from Frodo at Rivendell? And Tolkien's other works were certainly not examples of a naive black and white world view. The dragon Smaug was a mere footnot to the Hobbit, which concerned itself mostly with the conflict between Dwarves, Elves and Humans over Smaug's treasure. And you surely cannot forget the Elf-on-Elf warfare rampant throughout The Simarillion?[/comic_book_guy]
Teller didn't and shot off SEDAN, one of the dirtiest shots ever and the largest cratering experiment done at NTS.
I was able to visit the Nevada Test Site, and that very very large crater, in 1986 while I was Midshipman at the United States Naval Academy. I spent a month that summer at the Los Alamos nuclear lab and we took a trip the NTS just to check it out.
The hole was very impressive. I suppose it was more impressive that each of us had to wear personal dosimeters, and could stay outside of the bus for only 5 minutes or so. We also drove through a town designed to test the stability of various structures against nuclear blasts. It was fascinating to drive by proposed "nuke-proof" bomb shelters that were clearly damaged by a nuclear blast.
And the train-ride into the underground testing facility was fun too - it was sort of like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in more ways than one.
I think that you are underestimating the military capability of the Japanese at the end of the war. It's true that their naval and air forces were largely destroyed. It's also true that Japan was isolated from vital war materials.
It's also true that the Japanese resistance on Saipan, the first pre-war Japanese island invaded by the US, was so great that Japanese soldiers forced Japanese civilians to jump of cliffs to their deaths rather than suffer the indignity of falling under the occupation of the United States.
Furthermore, the ability of a people willing to spend their lives like water in resistence to an enemy cannot be underestimated. Consider Vietnam, for example. Also consider the tremendous resistance of the Japanese on Iwo Jima and other more or less worthless pieces of rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Consider the strident attitude of the North Koreans today - uncooperative despite rampant malnutrition. People don't give up so easily, even if they have no resources with which to fight.
The bottom line is that unless the United States was willing to accept a negotiated settlement to the war leaving the same clique that started war in power, rather than an unconditional surrender, more Japanese soldiers and civilians would have died had we not used the Atomic Bomb and had invaded Japan conventionally instead.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because they were largely untouched to that point and they had significant manufacturing and logistical facilities. They weren't just filled with helpless civilians
Actually Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely untouched by intention. These cities were deliberately preserved from allied bombings, along with Dresden and perhaps other German cities, for the purpose of having pristine targets onto which to drop the Atomic Bomb so we could determine with greater certainty the effects of nuclear weapons.
When the writing was on the wall and it was only a matter of time before the allied victory in Europe, we decided to bomb the hell out of Dresden, conventionally, more or less just to see what would happen. If the Nazis had held out longer, or if the Atomic Bomb was created sooner, Dresden would have been nuked.
However, I do agree with your point that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done for reasons other than impressing Josef Stalin and "scientific research". The anticipated casulties of the planned amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands were so great that the Atomic Bomb was used to shock Japan into unconditional surrender. The lesson to Japan in August, 1945 was this: You may continue fighting if you want, but if you do, we are just going to kill all of you with super weapons for which there is no defense whatsoever.
MS update downloaded the patch and it's already installed. It seems to me that hardly anyone is hearing about these bugs nowadays until after MS updates Windows. The lesson here (other than the obvious and silly "Don't use Windows") is to run MS update.
I can confirm this. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper died in 1992. She was the longest-serving officer is US Naval history (she even beat out Adm. Hyman Rickover, who developed the Navy's nuclear reactor program). Every year, for many years, Adm. Hopper would give a lecture to the plebes (freshmen) at the U.S. Naval Academy. I saw her speak there around 1984.
During her lecture, Adm. Hopper told us the story of the first computer bug. She also discussed COBOL. She also wrote the first complier in 1953. Let me say that again. She wrote the first complier.
She was a very wise person. Her motto was "It is always better to apologize than to ask permission". The idea being that if you have to seek approval for everything you do, you'll never get anything done at all. She also passed out lengths of copper wire, cut to the distance light travels in one nano-second. She was fantastic and inspirational and even though I'm not in the computer industry, I still feel a kinship towards her. She was a visionary, a pioneer, and a national treasure. And she had a hell of a sense of humor.
...is actually pretty simple: Boycott the Music Industry. It's all over-marketed crap anyway - the Madonna/Britney Spears kiss, for example, wasn't an artistic expression, it was a shock statement made to get people to watch the awards program and pay money to RIAA for the music manufactured by their neutered artists.
Stop stealing music. Stop buying music too. Support your local artists. Go to a local nightclub, watch the local bands, and happily pay the cover charge. Buy only CD's the performers sell themselves, and don't steal their music, because you'll be ripping of a performer, and not RIAA.
Your local garage band won't be a technically proficient, but they will be more honest and original, even if they are a cover band playing other peoples' music.
It is amnesty if RIAA releases them for liability for their past acts.
And why would RIAA (or anyone else) provide a blanket amnesty with no specifics? Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon an unconditional pardon in order to get the nation past Watergate, but it would have been better had the pardon been specific - Nixon's supporters wouldn't have been able to worm their way out of admitting Nixon's criminal liability for specific acts. All he had to do was to lay low for 20 years and come out "rested, tan and ready" and step into the shoes of an elder statesman.
What does this have to do with RIAA? They'd be as unwise as Ford was to issue a release from all claims without knowing what those claims of liability are.
Also, you need to understand a fundamental rule of contract law - A contract must be supported by "consideration", which is a bargained-for exchange. There has to be something going both ways. RIAA's forgiveness (whatever that's worth) is not binding at all unless RIAA receives something in return (admission of liability and promise not to do it again).
...Arnold will miraculously be elected as California's next governor.
Actually, the headline should read:
Stupid People who don't update their OS and Paranoid People who refuse to do so are responsible for one of the worst computer security outbreaks of the year.
I have a network of 16 computers. I've got an el-cheapo Linksys Firewall, and we download automatic updates. I've had absolutely no problems with MSBlast. None. Microsoft update, for those who ran it, fixed the problem weeks before the virus hit.
They need proof before assigning guilt, but only probably cause to get a warrant and arrest the guy. The statements that guy allegedly made are probably enough to get him arrested and get a search warrant issued for his computer, allowing for the weeks for computer forensics you speak of to take place.
As a complete aside, does XP have a means of allowing the system administrator to interrogate each computer on the network to see what updates have been installed?
That would be convenient. But the small paranoid man inside me also thinks that this may be another security vulnerability.
I absolutely agree with you. The USPTO is giving away too many patents to "inventors" who present ideas with no actual proof of concept. A good idea for patent reform would be to require patent applicants to actually deliver a working model of the invention to the USPTO - in the case of software patents, it would have to a compiled program that works the way the patent claims.
But that's not all. So many patents are sort of obvious (one-click shopping, for example). For some reason the USPTO considers that to be new "art", even though one-click shopping is just the software extension of a retailor keeping your billing information on file and automatically billing you for the products you purchase. There seem to be patents issued for software for "inventions" that merely impliment in software business practices that already exist in other forms in the real world.
IAAL, but IANAPL (I am not a Patent Lawyer).
If you want to test relative compiler technology, you use the fastest compiler for each platform. If you want to test the platform itself, you use software which is as close to identical between platforms as possible. Hence, gcc.
True, true, but who cares about relative compiler technology? The only benchmarck worth anything to the end user is real-life application performance.
Admittedly Macs aren't everyone's cup of tea, but finding fault with Apple because they actively develop their own operating systems (one of which is open source) is a bit like finding fault with your parents for actually raising you instead of putting you up for adoption when you were born.
What's the use of an open source OS when the hardware is completely closed-source and relies on a proprietary BIOS? Apple will be open source when I can build one all by myself using parts I can buy from someone other than Apple.
Should be able to run Doom III.... heh.
Hell, it'll be able to run Duke Nukem Forever.
It's been done before:
http://www.imdb.com/Title?0102812
It occurs to me that the publisher doesn't have to disclose this spyware in the EULA.
Why?
Because even though the illegal user is agreeing to the EULA, he isn't really upholding it, by reason of his illegal use of illegally duplicated software. There's no contract because the illegal user's agreement to the EULA is completely fraudulent. Or at least, if there is a contract, the user is in breach of the contract as soon as he agrees to it, and the publisher is therefore not bound by the contract either.
It's really quite ironic that many here are demanding the software publishers "play fair" with copyright violators. I find myself going so far as to support software that encrypts the illegal user's registry files and pops up a box that says "If you don't want to lose all your data, uninstall program X by clicking here or enter your credit card number."
Hell, it's still less annoying that that damn blinkin real audio icon in the XP toolbar that I can't get rid of.