Really, what's so difficult to understand about, "if you need additional information, tell the bailiff, and he will ask the judge about it."
I understand it the sentence. I just don't understand the point. What could possibly be wrong about (for example) looking up a definition in the encyclopedia brittanica? You are supposed to use your knowledge and judgement. No one knows everything, my judgement says look it up so I can make an informed opinion. I can understand not wanting to quote from wikipedia or something but a reference source like a vetted encyclopedia? It's ridiculous.
Which always made no sense to me. Wouldn't you want a jury with that type of technical knowledge or whatnot? Unless of course you're going to be lying and don't want someone who actually knows to catch you.....
Which is a different situation from my comment. This juror looked up and brought in the article from wikipedia into the deliberations. It was not something she read before knowing anything about the trial.
You are not allowed, however, to relate any special or expert knowledge or opinion that you have regarding business, technical or professional matters to your fellow jurors
I find this to be one of the problems with our system. If you have a doctor, lawyer, programmer, or whomever on the jury. There is absolutely no reason to disallow them from sharing their own technical knowledge. Particularly if that knowledge is necessary for the case. If the Prosecutor goes on a tangent arguing something and a juror knows that the lawyer is full of shit due to their own knowledge, how can you possibly justify not being able to tell the other jurors this during deliberations?
How does that hold up if I happened to have read an article the week before knowing anything about the trial which happened to address what the lawyer was talking about? If I remember the article and I remember reading it, is that still "unchallengeable testimony"?
Isn't a juror's own personal knowledge, predilections, and personal experiences all "unchallengeable testimony"? I find it hard to believe that a mistrial could happen because I happened to have read an article on some topic and believe the lawyer to be speaking out his ass and share this information with the other jurors. It would be up to them whether they consider it or not of course.
Bandwidth should be restricted (as it is now) not the amount of data.
Update the infrastructure and stop oversubscribing?! If they did that the costs WOULD skyrocket.
Nearly every other modern country has faster AND cheaper internet. Most of them don't have a download cap, they just have bandwidth limits like the US. This is because they've updated their infrastructure and, at the very least, oversubscribe less. In addition it's because there is actual competition between them.
Yes ISPs do things for profits and some do have huge profit margins, but they do this because it is so hard to get into the industry and they will continue to do this until the regulations and technology allows more options for broadband.
Then fix the regulations. The technology exists, the problem is that ISPs buy laws that prevent municipal ISPs. They prevent legislation that would allow competition. We need more competition in the ISP space. Maybe something similar to a European approach where some areas have the infrastructure owned by the government and it gets leased to any ISP who wants to use it. This would make lower the barrier to entry and promote competition. Either way, Pay-as-you-go is not a good option because all it will do is increase profits for ISPs and punish anyone who wants to actually USE their internet service. Right now, I have my desktop computer set up so I can access it from anywhere. I can upload/download files to and from my desktop whenever I need to or want to. Just last week I copied 11GB of data from a friend's computer to my own via this set up. Yes, this is a luxury I enjoy. However, many many people do similar things because they can. Developers come up with and sell utilities to facilitate these types of things for users who aren't as tech savvy. The giant boom of internet applications, streaming video, etc. in the US is facilitated and increased due to the unlimited nature of internet. As long as your speed is enough to support the quality you desire, you can watch/download/surf/whatever. PAYgo would reduce and maybe eliminate a lot of innovation that happens on the internet in the US.
The only restriction necessary is the current method of restricting bandwidth (granted they should update the infrastructure because at least in the US we get shafted for bandwidth). Pay as you go and download caps are just wrong. The only thing that ISPs worry about is the bandwidth at any given moment. As long as there is bandwidth to spare they are happy. Pay as you go, download caps, anything that is designed to make you consume less is done so because if you consume less then your bandwidth at any given time is going to be less.
In other words, update the infrastructure and stop oversubscribing and everything will be fine. Anything else is just ISPs trying to increase their profit margin rather than provide better service.
You don't have to. You can either compile to the lowest common denominator or you can compile for each available version and package together (kinda like when you download software and they come with the Windows, Mac, and Linux versions all together). When your code calls the System.loadLibrary("package") command it will load the appropriate.so file for the ISA you are running. Compiling for multiple ISA's is as easy as adding them to a text file list in your build file. =)
I just wanted to point out that Android introduced a JIT compiler in Froyo (2.2). That and it has the Native Development Kit for developing using C/C++ which has been greatly expanded and improved upon in Android 2.3.
Law enforcement are only allowed to do a full pat down when there is a reasonable suspicion that it is necessary. Outside of that suspicion it is a violation of fourth amendment rights to unreasonable search and seizure. They are treating everyone they pat-down as a criminal with no reason to believe as such. It's very simple, the only situation where someone may legally touch your genitals without your consent is when a Law Enforcement Official has a reasonable suspicion of criminal act and is performing a pat-down upon having reasonable suspicion that it is necessary. Outside of this, it is sexual assault. Therefore it is illegal and sexually abusive for a TSA agent to touch you. They are not law enforcement and you are not suspected of a crime, let alone having any reasonable suspicion to warrant a pat down.
If they performed the pat down without touching the genitals or a woman's breasts or any other number of indignities, then there wouldn't be this outrage. They purposefully "enhanced" the pat downs to make them more uncomfortable to encourage the use of the backscatter machines. The entire thing should be declared illegal and done away with.
Not all languages have a try..finally construct. In such a language, in a function that opens, reads and closes a file, rather than duplicating cleanup code several times over for each possible error that occurs, a GOTO can be an elegant way around this; saving maintenance, maintaining readability, but most importantly, maintaining structured code.
This could be handled by simply having a "process_error" function or whatnot. Especially elegant would be encapsulating using OOP. All the cleanup code existing inside the class and functions. You have to remember that if you have your try...catch...finally. If you throw an error inside the catch, the finally will never get called (kinda blows the whole guarantee out of the water huh?). For example, if you open, read, and close a file. Use an object wrapper that will clean up upon destruction of the wrapper. That way when the function ends, whether successfully, catching an error, or dying horribly, you're guaranteed that it get's cleaned up. Most languages that provide a destructor mechanism guarantee that it will always be called when the object is destroyed (whether by going out of scope or by explicitly destroying the object). Goto in this situation would probably be unnecessary to have structured code and in fact would probably complicate it further.
#2 - Initialize all variables to known values. int i; doesn't cut it. int i=0; does.
True dat. Lots security pitfalls here too -- not just garden variety bugs.
Just wanted to point out that this doesn't apply in all languages. When dealing with languages where int i; does initialize to a known value, it's unnecessary (though not wrong) to do int i=0;. For example, most languages that aren't C or C++. If you're coding in Java, you know that if you do int i; it will be initialized to 0 for you.
True, you are correct that just ignoring the fact that it's illegal doesn't make it legal. However, there are two driving forces that enable laws to work, 1) fear of punishment (vs risk of getting caught) and 2) the moral belief that what is illegal should actually be illegal. If the risk of getting caught for something is very very low, the only thing that makes people obey a law is that they believe it is wrong and that it should be illegal. If the majority of people believe that something that is illegal shouldn't be illegal and there is very little chance of being caught, then they aren't going to respect the law and will not follow it.
It's a case of psychology. not to mention that if a law criminalizes a majority of the population, it can't possibly be a good law.
Notice how it refers to "mobile phones" in general and not smartphones specifically. Most non-smartphone mobile phones would qualify as an embedded device due to the design and lack of customizability. For example:
Embedded systems are designed to do some specific task, rather than be a general-purpose computer for multiple tasks.
Smartphones are designed to be a general-purpose computer whereas non-smartphone mobile phones are designed for only the specific task of handling the communications stack and sometimes (this is where the line is blurred) allow it to run embedded java for some Carrier applications.
From the smartphone page:
A smartphone can be considered as a Personal Pocket Computer (PPC) with mobile phone functions, because these devices are mainly computers, although much smaller than a desktop computer (DC). Additionally a PPC (Personal Pocket Computer) is more personal than a DC (desktop computer).
If you're willing to budge that much, then I think we can agree on the PPC term. However, a PPC is simply a very small PC (not quite an embedded device). When writing an application for a smartphone, you consider it a PC with very low memory and cpu capacity (comparatively) you don't consider it as writing an application for an embedded device.
Also, considering the pure specs that a lot of smartphones have, they are more powerful than many PCs of the early 90's. An embedded device will have very very low system specs in order to use as little power as it needs to perform it's specific task.
You gave absolutely no evidence that the phone wasn't a PC. In fact you proved it is in fact a PC, albeit a low-powered one. You have a filesystem and files, a certain amount of memory that the OS manages. Security concerns (which are probably just as complex and serious as writing for a PC, enterprise software, a mainframe, etc.),. PC's and Phones both can be always on. People have already come up with botnet type things for smart phones or just trying to get your information. You could get a life crippling debt and be monitored more so on a PC than a phone because most people who do banking online will do it via their laptop or desktop computer, not their phone, unless the Bank has created an App for it.
Essentially it comes down to the fact that a smartphone is a personal computer. You have an operating system, software that can be installed and uninstalled, you can do just about everything on your smartphone that you can do on a traditional desktop or laptop computer (word processing, games, web browsing, music, movies, editing) and the desktop and laptop computer can make phone calls and text messages just as well as a smartphone if you get the software to do it (or using things like google voice).
A desktop, a laptop, a netbook, a smartphone, they are all PC's. They all provide for you an interface through which you do computing. An embedded device usually has a singular purpose (microwave, firmware in a set-top box, etc.). A smartphone is for multipurpose computing and it's made for a person to carry around and use themselves anytime, thus a Personal Computer or PC. Just because it's not an IBM-PC clone, doesn't mean it's not a PC.
That depends on where you draw the line of fair use. For the most part, I do not believe it is wrong to copy something outside of fair use. Though I do believe one should support any music/developer/author that you like and enjoy either by donations or, if you like the media, buying physical copies from them.
That's the approach I take. I will download music and share with my friends and enjoy. For the artists that I listen to and enjoy greatly, I will go see them perform, pay for concert tickets, and purchase CD's and other media directly from them at shows (only when I'm getting the media directly from them. I want my money to go directly to the artist, not the labels).
Looking at the quote you used, what was found illegal was the distribution. The P2P systems that were used allowed sharing and distribution. The argument that downloading in and of itself is not illegal goes like this:
I read every bit of information I could find, including case law. I studied the DMCA. Since then I have studied the NET Act. I have studied everything I could find. Guess what? I could not find a single line in any act that said that downloading anything was illegal, or even anything that could be construed to mean it. I submit that there’s a legitimate reason there is no law covering the downloads. I believe it’s because you cannot know for certain that a file is pirated until it is in your possession. File names mean nothing. Fake music files planted on Kazaa prove it. Fake video files planted on torrent sites prove it. Even non-pirated files get named with titles that could be misconstrued as being pirated. I also believe that intent is insufficient to come to the conclusion that a person is attempting to download a pirated file.
Furthermore, in reference to the Napster decision:
The district court further determined that plaintiffs’ exclusive rights under 106 were violated: “here the evidence establishes that a majority of Napster users use the service to download and upload copyrighted music. And by doing that, it constitutes-the uses constitute direct infringement of plaintiffs’ musical compositions, recordings.” The district court also noted that “it is pretty much acknowledged by Napster that this is infringement.” We agree that plaintiffs have shown that Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders’ exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction, 106(1); and distribution, 106(3). Napster users who upload file names to the search index for others to copy violate plaintiffs’ distribution rights. Napster users who download files containing copyrighted music violate plaintiffs’ reproduction rights.
And explaining it...
The Supreme Court essentially adopted this application of the law in its Grokster decision (545 U.S. 913, 936-39). The Court looked to the defendants’ own advertisements that users could download copyrighted files “to prove by a defendant’s own statements that his unlawful purpose disqualifies him from claiming protection.” (id. at 938). In other words, defendants’ promotion of an unlawful activity (downloading) was proof of their unlawful purpose.
A shrewd attorney could argue that this aspect of the opinion is dicta–that is, inessential to the outcome of the case–because file distribution by uploaders (which is certainly infringement) was also present.
Now, if you can quote an actual law or case where the it was explicitly stated that downloading in and of itself (there was no uploading occurring at all) is counted as infringement, then I will retract my statement and admit you are correct. Until then, it is pretty clear that there is no law nor precedent that states that downloading by itself is infringement and thus it depends on what judge/jury you end up with. There are other places where this is the situation, such as Canada. But logically consider that fact that since when is being in receipt of an unauthorised copy a copyright infringement on the part of the recipient? Since there is no law against "receiving infringing material" only distributing it logically makes sense that if you were downloading a new copy or something you legally owned it is no different than if you made that copy yourself. There is no distinguishable way to tell the difference and thus there is no way to enforce a downloading infringement. Or else don't you think
Considering that his testimony (regardless of it's truth) was that Crippen produced a disc of his own and placed it in the console to test it in front of him. I don't see why it would matter or cross his mind to ask if it was pirated or not considering that Crippen was not giving him the disc, he was simply showing him that the mod worked. Therefore, why would it matter at all to the customer whether or not the disc was pirated or not since he wasn't receiving it.
No. But the case was dropped for pretty much this reason. He provided a service that may or may not be intended for a legitimate purpose. If it was tested with a disc that he knew was pirated then I'd say there was intent, similarly, if I explicitly asked you for DVD drives to set up my pirate DVD operation then you'd be a contributor to the infringement. Whether he knew or should have known the disc was pirated would be up to the prosecution to show. Since the prosecution has failed to even show there was a disc it's kind of academic.
I can agree that if he tested it with a disc he knew to be pirated then there might be intent. Whether that is grounds for anything at all remains to be seen because, as you said, the prosecution failed to even show there was a disc in the first place.
Once a jury has been impanelled and sworn, jeopardy attaches and a subsequent prosecution is barred, if a mistrial is ordered—absent a showing of imperious necessity.3 As stated by Mr. Justice Story in United States v. Coolidge, 25 Fed.Cas. page 622, No.14,858, the discretion is to be exercised 'only in very extraordinary and striking circumstances.'
Only in the case of a mistrial (a hung jury is considered a mistrial) would Jeopardy not attach after a jury is sworn in. In non-jury trials it attaches when the first witness is sworn in and begins to testify.
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Really, what's so difficult to understand about, "if you need additional information, tell the bailiff, and he will ask the judge about it."
I understand it the sentence. I just don't understand the point. What could possibly be wrong about (for example) looking up a definition in the encyclopedia brittanica? You are supposed to use your knowledge and judgement. No one knows everything, my judgement says look it up so I can make an informed opinion. I can understand not wanting to quote from wikipedia or something but a reference source like a vetted encyclopedia? It's ridiculous.
Wait, so.....before serving the fresh coffee with boiling water it should instead sit around for a while to cool down?
Which always made no sense to me. Wouldn't you want a jury with that type of technical knowledge or whatnot? Unless of course you're going to be lying and don't want someone who actually knows to catch you.....
Which is a different situation from my comment. This juror looked up and brought in the article from wikipedia into the deliberations. It was not something she read before knowing anything about the trial.
Everyone believes they are in the middle.
You are not allowed, however, to relate any special or expert knowledge or opinion that you have regarding business, technical or professional matters to your fellow jurors
I find this to be one of the problems with our system. If you have a doctor, lawyer, programmer, or whomever on the jury. There is absolutely no reason to disallow them from sharing their own technical knowledge. Particularly if that knowledge is necessary for the case. If the Prosecutor goes on a tangent arguing something and a juror knows that the lawyer is full of shit due to their own knowledge, how can you possibly justify not being able to tell the other jurors this during deliberations?
and this is one reason why our legal system is a bit messed up.
How does that hold up if I happened to have read an article the week before knowing anything about the trial which happened to address what the lawyer was talking about? If I remember the article and I remember reading it, is that still "unchallengeable testimony"?
Isn't a juror's own personal knowledge, predilections, and personal experiences all "unchallengeable testimony"? I find it hard to believe that a mistrial could happen because I happened to have read an article on some topic and believe the lawyer to be speaking out his ass and share this information with the other jurors. It would be up to them whether they consider it or not of course.
you're completely pathetic
cower some more
Dude. You need new lines. These are old already =P
Bandwidth should be restricted (as it is now) not the amount of data.
Update the infrastructure and stop oversubscribing?! If they did that the costs WOULD skyrocket.
Nearly every other modern country has faster AND cheaper internet. Most of them don't have a download cap, they just have bandwidth limits like the US. This is because they've updated their infrastructure and, at the very least, oversubscribe less. In addition it's because there is actual competition between them.
Yes ISPs do things for profits and some do have huge profit margins, but they do this because it is so hard to get into the industry and they will continue to do this until the regulations and technology allows more options for broadband.
Then fix the regulations. The technology exists, the problem is that ISPs buy laws that prevent municipal ISPs. They prevent legislation that would allow competition. We need more competition in the ISP space. Maybe something similar to a European approach where some areas have the infrastructure owned by the government and it gets leased to any ISP who wants to use it. This would make lower the barrier to entry and promote competition. Either way, Pay-as-you-go is not a good option because all it will do is increase profits for ISPs and punish anyone who wants to actually USE their internet service. Right now, I have my desktop computer set up so I can access it from anywhere. I can upload/download files to and from my desktop whenever I need to or want to. Just last week I copied 11GB of data from a friend's computer to my own via this set up. Yes, this is a luxury I enjoy. However, many many people do similar things because they can. Developers come up with and sell utilities to facilitate these types of things for users who aren't as tech savvy. The giant boom of internet applications, streaming video, etc. in the US is facilitated and increased due to the unlimited nature of internet. As long as your speed is enough to support the quality you desire, you can watch/download/surf/whatever. PAYgo would reduce and maybe eliminate a lot of innovation that happens on the internet in the US.
The only restriction necessary is the current method of restricting bandwidth (granted they should update the infrastructure because at least in the US we get shafted for bandwidth). Pay as you go and download caps are just wrong. The only thing that ISPs worry about is the bandwidth at any given moment. As long as there is bandwidth to spare they are happy. Pay as you go, download caps, anything that is designed to make you consume less is done so because if you consume less then your bandwidth at any given time is going to be less.
In other words, update the infrastructure and stop oversubscribing and everything will be fine. Anything else is just ISPs trying to increase their profit margin rather than provide better service.
You don't have to. You can either compile to the lowest common denominator or you can compile for each available version and package together (kinda like when you download software and they come with the Windows, Mac, and Linux versions all together). When your code calls the System.loadLibrary("package") command it will load the appropriate .so file for the ISA you are running. Compiling for multiple ISA's is as easy as adding them to a text file list in your build file. =)
I just wanted to point out that Android introduced a JIT compiler in Froyo (2.2). That and it has the Native Development Kit for developing using C/C++ which has been greatly expanded and improved upon in Android 2.3.
Law enforcement are only allowed to do a full pat down when there is a reasonable suspicion that it is necessary. Outside of that suspicion it is a violation of fourth amendment rights to unreasonable search and seizure. They are treating everyone they pat-down as a criminal with no reason to believe as such. It's very simple, the only situation where someone may legally touch your genitals without your consent is when a Law Enforcement Official has a reasonable suspicion of criminal act and is performing a pat-down upon having reasonable suspicion that it is necessary. Outside of this, it is sexual assault. Therefore it is illegal and sexually abusive for a TSA agent to touch you. They are not law enforcement and you are not suspected of a crime, let alone having any reasonable suspicion to warrant a pat down.
If they performed the pat down without touching the genitals or a woman's breasts or any other number of indignities, then there wouldn't be this outrage. They purposefully "enhanced" the pat downs to make them more uncomfortable to encourage the use of the backscatter machines. The entire thing should be declared illegal and done away with.
Not all languages have a try..finally construct. In such a language, in a function that opens, reads and closes a file, rather than duplicating cleanup code several times over for each possible error that occurs, a GOTO can be an elegant way around this; saving maintenance, maintaining readability, but most importantly, maintaining structured code.
This could be handled by simply having a "process_error" function or whatnot. Especially elegant would be encapsulating using OOP. All the cleanup code existing inside the class and functions. You have to remember that if you have your try...catch...finally. If you throw an error inside the catch, the finally will never get called (kinda blows the whole guarantee out of the water huh?). For example, if you open, read, and close a file. Use an object wrapper that will clean up upon destruction of the wrapper. That way when the function ends, whether successfully, catching an error, or dying horribly, you're guaranteed that it get's cleaned up. Most languages that provide a destructor mechanism guarantee that it will always be called when the object is destroyed (whether by going out of scope or by explicitly destroying the object). Goto in this situation would probably be unnecessary to have structured code and in fact would probably complicate it further.
IT BURNS IT BURNS!!!!!
#2 - Initialize all variables to known values. int i; doesn't cut it. int i=0; does.
True dat. Lots security pitfalls here too -- not just garden variety bugs.
Just wanted to point out that this doesn't apply in all languages. When dealing with languages where int i; does initialize to a known value, it's unnecessary (though not wrong) to do int i=0;. For example, most languages that aren't C or C++. If you're coding in Java, you know that if you do int i; it will be initialized to 0 for you.
True, you are correct that just ignoring the fact that it's illegal doesn't make it legal. However, there are two driving forces that enable laws to work, 1) fear of punishment (vs risk of getting caught) and 2) the moral belief that what is illegal should actually be illegal. If the risk of getting caught for something is very very low, the only thing that makes people obey a law is that they believe it is wrong and that it should be illegal. If the majority of people believe that something that is illegal shouldn't be illegal and there is very little chance of being caught, then they aren't going to respect the law and will not follow it.
It's a case of psychology. not to mention that if a law criminalizes a majority of the population, it can't possibly be a good law.
Notice how it refers to "mobile phones" in general and not smartphones specifically. Most non-smartphone mobile phones would qualify as an embedded device due to the design and lack of customizability. For example:
Embedded systems are designed to do some specific task, rather than be a general-purpose computer for multiple tasks.
Smartphones are designed to be a general-purpose computer whereas non-smartphone mobile phones are designed for only the specific task of handling the communications stack and sometimes (this is where the line is blurred) allow it to run embedded java for some Carrier applications.
From the smartphone page:
A smartphone can be considered as a Personal Pocket Computer (PPC) with mobile phone functions, because these devices are mainly computers, although much smaller than a desktop computer (DC). Additionally a PPC (Personal Pocket Computer) is more personal than a DC (desktop computer).
If you're willing to budge that much, then I think we can agree on the PPC term. However, a PPC is simply a very small PC (not quite an embedded device). When writing an application for a smartphone, you consider it a PC with very low memory and cpu capacity (comparatively) you don't consider it as writing an application for an embedded device.
Also, considering the pure specs that a lot of smartphones have, they are more powerful than many PCs of the early 90's. An embedded device will have very very low system specs in order to use as little power as it needs to perform it's specific task.
That's what we call in the trade an embedded device, not a PC.
The definition of an embedded device would disagree with you:
An embedded system is a computer system designed to perform one or a few dedicated functions often with real-time computing constraints.
As opposed to:
By contrast, a general-purpose computer, such as a personal computer (PC), is designed to be flexible and meet a wide range of end-user needs.
Which one sounds more like a smartphone? Embedded Device
You gave absolutely no evidence that the phone wasn't a PC. In fact you proved it is in fact a PC, albeit a low-powered one. You have a filesystem and files, a certain amount of memory that the OS manages. Security concerns (which are probably just as complex and serious as writing for a PC, enterprise software, a mainframe, etc.),. PC's and Phones both can be always on. People have already come up with botnet type things for smart phones or just trying to get your information. You could get a life crippling debt and be monitored more so on a PC than a phone because most people who do banking online will do it via their laptop or desktop computer, not their phone, unless the Bank has created an App for it.
Essentially it comes down to the fact that a smartphone is a personal computer. You have an operating system, software that can be installed and uninstalled, you can do just about everything on your smartphone that you can do on a traditional desktop or laptop computer (word processing, games, web browsing, music, movies, editing) and the desktop and laptop computer can make phone calls and text messages just as well as a smartphone if you get the software to do it (or using things like google voice).
A desktop, a laptop, a netbook, a smartphone, they are all PC's. They all provide for you an interface through which you do computing. An embedded device usually has a singular purpose (microwave, firmware in a set-top box, etc.). A smartphone is for multipurpose computing and it's made for a person to carry around and use themselves anytime, thus a Personal Computer or PC. Just because it's not an IBM-PC clone, doesn't mean it's not a PC.
That depends on where you draw the line of fair use. For the most part, I do not believe it is wrong to copy something outside of fair use. Though I do believe one should support any music/developer/author that you like and enjoy either by donations or, if you like the media, buying physical copies from them.
That's the approach I take. I will download music and share with my friends and enjoy. For the artists that I listen to and enjoy greatly, I will go see them perform, pay for concert tickets, and purchase CD's and other media directly from them at shows (only when I'm getting the media directly from them. I want my money to go directly to the artist, not the labels).
Here's a great link to look at http://techliberation.com/2007/03/20/is-downloading-illegal-wanna-bet/
Looking at the quote you used, what was found illegal was the distribution. The P2P systems that were used allowed sharing and distribution. The argument that downloading in and of itself is not illegal goes like this:
I read every bit of information I could find, including case law. I studied the DMCA. Since then I have studied the NET Act. I have studied everything I could find. Guess what? I could not find a single line in any act that said that downloading anything was illegal, or even anything that could be construed to mean it. I submit that there’s a legitimate reason there is no law covering the downloads. I believe it’s because you cannot know for certain that a file is pirated until it is in your possession. File names mean nothing. Fake music files planted on Kazaa prove it. Fake video files planted on torrent sites prove it. Even non-pirated files get named with titles that could be misconstrued as being pirated. I also believe that intent is insufficient to come to the conclusion that a person is attempting to download a pirated file.
Furthermore, in reference to the Napster decision:
The district court further determined that plaintiffs’ exclusive rights under 106 were violated: “here the evidence establishes that a majority of Napster users use the service to download and upload copyrighted music. And by doing that, it constitutes-the uses constitute direct infringement of plaintiffs’ musical compositions, recordings.” The district court also noted that “it is pretty much acknowledged by Napster that this is infringement.” We agree that plaintiffs have shown that Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders’ exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction, 106(1); and distribution, 106(3). Napster users who upload file names to the search index for others to copy violate plaintiffs’ distribution rights. Napster users who download files containing copyrighted music violate plaintiffs’ reproduction rights.
And explaining it...
The Supreme Court essentially adopted this application of the law in its Grokster decision (545 U.S. 913, 936-39). The Court looked to the defendants’ own advertisements that users could download copyrighted files “to prove by a defendant’s own statements that his unlawful purpose disqualifies him from claiming protection.” (id. at 938). In other words, defendants’ promotion of an unlawful activity (downloading) was proof of their unlawful purpose.
A shrewd attorney could argue that this aspect of the opinion is dicta–that is, inessential to the outcome of the case–because file distribution by uploaders (which is certainly infringement) was also present.
Now, if you can quote an actual law or case where the it was explicitly stated that downloading in and of itself (there was no uploading occurring at all) is counted as infringement, then I will retract my statement and admit you are correct. Until then, it is pretty clear that there is no law nor precedent that states that downloading by itself is infringement and thus it depends on what judge/jury you end up with. There are other places where this is the situation, such as Canada. But logically consider that fact that since when is being in receipt of an unauthorised copy a copyright infringement on the part of the recipient? Since there is no law against "receiving infringing material" only distributing it logically makes sense that if you were downloading a new copy or something you legally owned it is no different than if you made that copy yourself. There is no distinguishable way to tell the difference and thus there is no way to enforce a downloading infringement. Or else don't you think
Considering that his testimony (regardless of it's truth) was that Crippen produced a disc of his own and placed it in the console to test it in front of him. I don't see why it would matter or cross his mind to ask if it was pirated or not considering that Crippen was not giving him the disc, he was simply showing him that the mod worked. Therefore, why would it matter at all to the customer whether or not the disc was pirated or not since he wasn't receiving it.
No. But the case was dropped for pretty much this reason. He provided a service that may or may not be intended for a legitimate purpose. If it was tested with a disc that he knew was pirated then I'd say there was intent, similarly, if I explicitly asked you for DVD drives to set up my pirate DVD operation then you'd be a contributor to the infringement. Whether he knew or should have known the disc was pirated would be up to the prosecution to show. Since the prosecution has failed to even show there was a disc it's kind of academic.
I can agree that if he tested it with a disc he knew to be pirated then there might be intent. Whether that is grounds for anything at all remains to be seen because, as you said, the prosecution failed to even show there was a disc in the first place.
Once again, wrong.
The U. S. Supreme Court has held that jeopardy attaches during a jury trial when the jury is sworn.
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/double+jeopardy
And from the same wikipedia article you quoted:
Jeopardy attaches in a jury trial once the jury and alternates are impaneled and sworn in.
Here's another reference:
http://openjurist.org/367/us/364
Once a jury has been impanelled and sworn, jeopardy attaches and a subsequent prosecution is barred, if a mistrial is ordered—absent a showing of imperious necessity.3 As stated by Mr. Justice Story in United States v. Coolidge, 25 Fed.Cas. page 622, No.14,858, the discretion is to be exercised 'only in very extraordinary and striking circumstances.'
Only in the case of a mistrial (a hung jury is considered a mistrial) would Jeopardy not attach after a jury is sworn in. In non-jury trials it attaches when the first witness is sworn in and begins to testify.