I'm not sure if the EFF and this guy have talked, but I can think of a few reasons why the two might avoid involvement: First, any time you go through litigation, there is a chance you'll lose, which could mean bankruptcy as well as loss of life savings. Second, the court already shot Napster down so it is kind of a touchy area.
The question that would be raised at trial would be "What are most of the files being searched for?" In Google's case, it's probably sex or Britney Spears. In this guy's case it is probably mp3/ogg.
Maybe people have gotten wise to the fact that a really fun game that lacks shitloads of bells and whistles, and full-motion video after every level will make a bigger profit
Have you factored into your profit estimate the fact that a freeware version of the "simple" game will find its way to the net in several incarnations? Think Tetris. How many freebie versions of Tetris are there?
I've played PopCap's popular "Bookworm" game on Yahoo. I'm betting I could make a cheap knockoff of it in an evening or two. The problem with the small budget games is that the software tools these days are so good, original ideas can be copied to a high degree by fairly amateur programmers.
If you're going to make money at these things, you've got to have good marketing and you've got to find someone (like Yahoo) to partner with.
I'm rather suprised more people aren't mentioning this. IBM has bankrupted more than one smaller fish in the past who tried to play them in the court room only to find themselves under a mountain of patent infringement lawsuits months later.
When it comes to litigation, IBM is a prize fighter who knows where to hit and knows to hit there very hard.
So there are three possibilities as I see it:
1) SCO wants to be bought out. Darl McBride has mentioned this in the past as being a reasonable thing for SCO's shareholders. 2) SCO wants a token settlement from IBM to use as a weapon for suing other companies who have Linux deployed without a Unix license. 3) SCO has a solid foundation to their case.
Hiring a well-known lawyer like David Boies (ahem, didn't the justice department win the battle but lose the war in their anti-trust suit against microsoft??) seems to imply either #1 or #2. Giving "experts" very small selections of code (80 lines?? give me a break!) for media propaganda suggests either #1 or #2.
I guess agree with what you closed with, SCO probably doesn't even have a case to begin with.
Speaking of the services... What is the difference between them nowadays? Several years back all my friends made a mass exodus from AIM to ICQ. The reason was that some of the females had made some unfortunate acquaintances online and wanted to use ICQ's option so that they never appeared online to those people. With ICQ you could go online invisible and only allow your friends to see that you are online, AIM had no such option at that time.
As a single individual running a company, it is often times advantageous to be a sole proprietor instead of incorporating. For instance you don't get double-taxed and there are no legally mandated filings or shareholder meetings. The down side, of course, is liability. Novak was rather foolish not to get liability insurance, and that is why i think he is bankrupt.
Being able to LEARN YOUR NAME is an unprecidented right? Damn. When did we change the meaning of "precident?"
That's an interesting spin on what I said, the right being granted is being able to pierce someones privacy without having a judge review the facts. That is the unprecedented right. Certainly not for all time, but for recent times in this country people's privacy is a big deal and companies have had to convince a judge to remove it.
An action that is consistent with a logical and sensible worldview. Consistency and honesty are the only real universal constants when it comes to ethics, IMO.
Interesting. Okay. Very different from the etymology of the word and the legal and webster defintion, but okay.
RIAA was ethical in following the DMCA as written.
I think most people would say they weren't violating any rules of ethics. Since your concept of ethics seems to concern "honesty" and "consistency" though I don't see this being a useful discourse as I tend to think ethics involves right, wrong and moral standards.
Out of curiousity... My exposure to contract law is limited, but... Isn't a contract supposed to include payment of consideration to be valid? I know that in real estate transactions (which is where my experience comes from) family members can create contracts between one another with "love and affection" being the consideration. Is "getting to see SCO's source" considered payment of a consideration?
Why would they? They're just looking for names using the law as written.
And Verizon's point is that the law as written is unjust. This isn't about getting names, it's about granting large corporations unprecendented rights over the individual citizen.
It's absolutely not in RIAA's interests, nor is it ethical, for them to not pursue the rights given to them in law when they are attempting to exercise those rights.
What exactly is your definition of ethical? If one feels that the DMCA is unconstitutional and decides to ask a judge instead of a clerk to sign off on a subpoena, who is the supposed audience that is going to declare this action unethical?
And how exactly would your lawsuit survive a motion to dismiss?
Verizon was served by a (valid under the DMCA) subpoena. At this point they could have just turned over the information free from threat of a lawsuit, as you can't be sued for complying with an order from a court.
Remember: This whole RIAA/Verizon stint has been RIAA wanting to find the real people so it can file claims against them.
If that were true, RIAA would have simply side-stepped the Verizon issue, presented a judge with their evidence that copyright infringement has occurred, and asked the judge to sign a subpoena.
The issue is can a media giant making billions of dollars a year just ask a clerk making a few tens of thousands a year to sign off on a subpoena? Isn't there an appearance of impropriety here?
RIAA didn't sidestep the issue because they do not want to lose this ridiculous power granted to them by the DMCA, and withdrawing the clerk-signed subpoena in favor of a judge-signed one would set a precedent they don't want set.
Let's all write a letter to congress thanking them for passing a law which threatens ISPs with financial ruin if they do not comply with what a business says, but essentially holds those businesses unaccountable for abuse of that law.
Any takedown notice issued by a company whose revenue exceeds $1 million should be accompanied by a bond for $100,000. If the target of the takedown contests the takedown, the issuing company should have thirty days to commence litigation or forfeit the bond in its entirety to the defendant. This bond amount should not limit in any way the ability of the defendant to sue for damages. The bond simply exists as a token to ensure that corporations will perform substantial legwork before issuing a DMCA based takedown notice.
The characters in the book thought it had a 1000 to 1 chance of missing too, but they were horribly wrong.
Imagine how boring the book would have been if they were right!
Interestingly Lucifer's Hammer has become practically required reading for the "survivalist" movement (people who believe in being prepared for a catastrophic destruction of civilization... they got a little too closely associated with the Y2K nuts a couple years back, but for the most part they are fairly level-headed).
But Lucifer's Hammer is a good read. I think it's filed under SciFi, but it is pretty light on the Science Fiction.
Babylon 5 tried this in the first season. They had an alien who looked kind of like a praying mantis. The arms, head and mouth were controlled by robotics. The alien was roundly criticized for looking too fake. Nobody mentioned "well at least it didn't look like a human who has been worked on by a make-up artist."
It is expensive to make an alien which doesn't look like a human and isn't criticized for looking fake. Some of the better examples such as Jabba the Hut, Sy Snoodles or Salacious Crumb generally didn't move around and were still very expensive to make.
I believe microsoft has sufficiently demonstrated to the people that it now has the political prowess to thwart any legal challenge to how it uses its monopoly. What was it the Bush administration was saying after the newly manned justice department quickly settled the suit? Something like they didn't see why the government was bringing microsoft to trial in the first place? I'm sure somebody has the article stashed away somewhere.
After being found guilty of illegally using their monopoly, they were told to pay a penalty that is less than 10% of what they made breaking the law. If the penalty for stealing $100 is paying a $10 fine, why on earth would you stop stealing $100?
I'm somewhat curious about information other people have to give on this issue. I recall reading an article once (sorry, don't remember exactly where) that in Germany, the "minimum wage" (or whatever their equivalent is) jobs are generally held by resident aliens because the government dole is close enough to that minimum wage that the citizens would rather not take the low paying jobs.
Anybody have better feedback on this? It's hard to validate all this of course because my information comes from American media.
Burglars have successfully sued homeowners for falling through a roof and injuring themselves whilst breaking into said house.
I believe this is a pseudo-urban-legend. Check this article. Scroll down to where it says "Tales of the Absurd". It says:
Ronald Reagan recounted how a cat burglar sued a homeowner for injuries incurred while falling through the homeowner's skylight. When the real case was identified, it turned out that the plaintiff was not a cat burglar at all. He was a high school student who had been sent to retrieve athletic equipment stored on the roof of the school and had fallen through a skylight that had been painted black.
This particularly news story pointed out that the burglars were mere children, which made it even worse. The facts were these: a group of high school students were playing soccer (or whatever) near their school gym on a weekend. The gym --the entire school -- was closed. They managed to kick the ball up on the roof of the gym. Enterprising boys, they climbed up on the roof, which was clearly forbidden by posted signs. On the roof was a skylight, which had been painted over in the same color as the rest of the roof. The boys didn't notice the skylight, walked on it, and fell through it. THey were injured. The school was held liable for creating a hazard by painting over the skylight: even one of the maintenance staff who had walked on it during school hours would have risked the boys' fate.
A google search on the subject turns up MANY references to a case like this in California where a cat burglar fell through a painted skylight and won. Depending on which item you read he won either because the insurance company settled or because the jury felt the school had failed to make itself safe to burgle. Nobody, not even the article I linked to, provides specifics so one could verify that facts independently. I didn't even get a hit on snopes.
Another interesting hit a I did get is here. An analysis of california's 1996 prop 213 which refers, vaguely, to this court case. Again no specifics are given.
Yes... yes it does happen... You'd be amazed how many bad things programmers do. Another example of what not to do... I once tried working with some code someone else that looked like this:
The intention here was that if the function returned "true", some error had occurred. All this was in Java BTW. The problem? For starters Java programming usually doesn't involve checking return codes for success/failure. An error was occurring and nobody could figure out why. So I tracked it down to that code, then asked the guy who wrote it "How am I supposed to tell *WHAT* went wrong?" His response was something like just make sure the input is valid and nothing will go wrong. "WHAT'S WRONG WITH THROWING AN EXCEPTION?!" I ask. "Oh, those have to be caught"... grrrrr....
6 hours of my time, and probably 80 man hours total could have been saved if exception handling, which is the correct way to deal with this problem, had been implemented to begin with.
Looking through the textbooks and syllabi for the CS courses offered at the local university revealed that none of those courses really cover exception handling. The C++ and Java courses cover what exceptions are and how they are used at the tail end of their curriculum... But unless you are truly interested in writing software, it is something you don't learn until you make a mistake like the above and some technical lead calls you into his office for a "code review".
Not like a few years ago when students were enrolling because they wanted to make a quick buck.
Unfortunately the industry is still fat with these people who don't truly appreciate the art and science of software design... and they are determined to make back all that time and money they invested in it during college. Only now they have a couple years of "seniority". It's very disheartening how many companies I see distressed over custom software development because they keep hiring "experts" who write bloated code that doesn't accomplish anything anyway...
I see these kinds of stories too often:
No really, OO is a great tool for rapid development... I don't care what the guy who failed that course tells you -- stop prototyping in purely procedural code! If you had encapsulated that data you could have protected access to it with a semaphore. Now that you need to scale up suddenly your whole application is breaking because your "expert" used simple global variables and you have multiple threads modifying them causing random crashes you can't track down.
Re:About as viral as accidentally giving away secr
on
What if SCO is Right?
·
· Score: 1
If I understand SCO's argument correctly (and I may not, and I'm certainly not an SCO sympathizer)...
The moment a linux kernel was released that had their IP in it, a problem occurred. That code (only the code which violated their IP rights) was said to be GPL, but in fact the submitter had not been given the right to relicense the SCO code in the GPL. The code that violates their IP was therefore never GPL.
I'm not sure how they could be restricted from filing suit against distribution of their IP protected code that is in the kernel but not GPL.
They filed the suit against IBM in March, but they only stopped distributing their own version of Linux on Wednesday of this week!
Even if continued distribution of the kernel represented their giving up their IP rights (which I'm not saying is or is not true), the distribution of their IP prior to discovery is still actionable.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if the EFF and this guy have talked, but I can think of a few reasons why the two might avoid involvement: First, any time you go through litigation, there is a chance you'll lose, which could mean bankruptcy as well as loss of life savings. Second, the court already shot Napster down so it is kind of a touchy area.
The question that would be raised at trial would be "What are most of the files being searched for?" In Google's case, it's probably sex or Britney Spears. In this guy's case it is probably mp3/ogg.
Maybe people have gotten wise to the fact that a really fun game that lacks shitloads of bells and whistles, and full-motion video after every level will make a bigger profit
Have you factored into your profit estimate the fact that a freeware version of the "simple" game will find its way to the net in several incarnations? Think Tetris. How many freebie versions of Tetris are there?
I've played PopCap's popular "Bookworm" game on Yahoo. I'm betting I could make a cheap knockoff of it in an evening or two. The problem with the small budget games is that the software tools these days are so good, original ideas can be copied to a high degree by fairly amateur programmers.
If you're going to make money at these things, you've got to have good marketing and you've got to find someone (like Yahoo) to partner with.
I'm rather suprised more people aren't mentioning this. IBM has bankrupted more than one smaller fish in the past who tried to play them in the court room only to find themselves under a mountain of patent infringement lawsuits months later.
When it comes to litigation, IBM is a prize fighter who knows where to hit and knows to hit there very hard.
So there are three possibilities as I see it:
1) SCO wants to be bought out. Darl McBride has mentioned this in the past as being a reasonable thing for SCO's shareholders.
2) SCO wants a token settlement from IBM to use as a weapon for suing other companies who have Linux deployed without a Unix license.
3) SCO has a solid foundation to their case.
Hiring a well-known lawyer like David Boies (ahem, didn't the justice department win the battle but lose the war in their anti-trust suit against microsoft??) seems to imply either #1 or #2. Giving "experts" very small selections of code (80 lines?? give me a break!) for media propaganda suggests either #1 or #2.
I guess agree with what you closed with, SCO probably doesn't even have a case to begin with.
Speaking of the services... What is the difference between them nowadays? Several years back all my friends made a mass exodus from AIM to ICQ. The reason was that some of the females had made some unfortunate acquaintances online and wanted to use ICQ's option so that they never appeared online to those people. With ICQ you could go online invisible and only allow your friends to see that you are online, AIM had no such option at that time.
Does AIM have this now? Has ICQ lost it?
Pringles cans work great for unidirectional. I'm going to go out on a limb here and gues that he didn't try a cheaper alternative like maybe An apple approved omnidirectional high gain antenna for the AirPort Extreme. At half the cost of an extra AirPort, I would think it a pretty good deal.
As a single individual running a company, it is often times advantageous to be a sole proprietor instead of incorporating. For instance you don't get double-taxed and there are no legally mandated filings or shareholder meetings. The down side, of course, is liability. Novak was rather foolish not to get liability insurance, and that is why i think he is bankrupt.
Keep in mind that it isn't he whose filed for bankruptcy, it's his company.
From the web site:
On June 2, 3003 Robert Novak d/b/ Pets Warehouse and d/b/a petswarehouse.com filed for bankruptcy in the E.D.N.Y.
He is his company.
His personal credit won't be harmed, only the corporation's would.
I suspect his personal credit will be greatly harmed.
Being able to LEARN YOUR NAME is an unprecidented right? Damn. When did we change the meaning of "precident?"
That's an interesting spin on what I said, the right being granted is being able to pierce someones privacy without having a judge review the facts. That is the unprecedented right. Certainly not for all time, but for recent times in this country people's privacy is a big deal and companies have had to convince a judge to remove it.
An action that is consistent with a logical and sensible worldview. Consistency and honesty are the only real universal constants when it comes to ethics, IMO.
Interesting. Okay. Very different from the etymology of the word and the legal and webster defintion, but okay.
RIAA was ethical in following the DMCA as written.
I think most people would say they weren't violating any rules of ethics. Since your concept of ethics seems to concern "honesty" and "consistency" though I don't see this being a useful discourse as I tend to think ethics involves right, wrong and moral standards.
Out of curiousity... My exposure to contract law is limited, but... Isn't a contract supposed to include payment of consideration to be valid? I know that in real estate transactions (which is where my experience comes from) family members can create contracts between one another with "love and affection" being the consideration. Is "getting to see SCO's source" considered payment of a consideration?
Why would they? They're just looking for names using the law as written.
And Verizon's point is that the law as written is unjust. This isn't about getting names, it's about granting large corporations unprecendented rights over the individual citizen.
It's absolutely not in RIAA's interests, nor is it ethical, for them to not pursue the rights given to them in law when they are attempting to exercise those rights.
What exactly is your definition of ethical? If one feels that the DMCA is unconstitutional and decides to ask a judge instead of a clerk to sign off on a subpoena, who is the supposed audience that is going to declare this action unethical?
And how exactly would your lawsuit survive a motion to dismiss?
Verizon was served by a (valid under the DMCA) subpoena. At this point they could have just turned over the information free from threat of a lawsuit, as you can't be sued for complying with an order from a court.
Exactly what theory is your case built on here?
Remember: This whole RIAA/Verizon stint has been RIAA wanting to find the real people so it can file claims against them.
If that were true, RIAA would have simply side-stepped the Verizon issue, presented a judge with their evidence that copyright infringement has occurred, and asked the judge to sign a subpoena.
The issue is can a media giant making billions of dollars a year just ask a clerk making a few tens of thousands a year to sign off on a subpoena? Isn't there an appearance of impropriety here?
RIAA didn't sidestep the issue because they do not want to lose this ridiculous power granted to them by the DMCA, and withdrawing the clerk-signed subpoena in favor of a judge-signed one would set a precedent they don't want set.
Yes, you are correct.
Let's all write a letter to congress thanking them for passing a law which threatens ISPs with financial ruin if they do not comply with what a business says, but essentially holds those businesses unaccountable for abuse of that law.
Any takedown notice issued by a company whose revenue exceeds $1 million should be accompanied by a bond for $100,000. If the target of the takedown contests the takedown, the issuing company should have thirty days to commence litigation or forfeit the bond in its entirety to the defendant. This bond amount should not limit in any way the ability of the defendant to sue for damages. The bond simply exists as a token to ensure that corporations will perform substantial legwork before issuing a DMCA based takedown notice.
Would it be ok to spell it $CO from now on, especially since they seem to be in bed with M$?
In bed with M$?? Let's look at what the article says:
What do you see as a company's options in the face of your warning? I would suspend any new Linux-related activities until this is all sorted out.
This is not in bed. This is in a dirty bathroom stall, in a seedy part of town, with one party on his or her knees.
The characters in the book thought it had a 1000 to 1 chance of missing too, but they were horribly wrong.
Imagine how boring the book would have been if they were right!
Interestingly Lucifer's Hammer has become practically required reading for the "survivalist" movement (people who believe in being prepared for a catastrophic destruction of civilization... they got a little too closely associated with the Y2K nuts a couple years back, but for the most part they are fairly level-headed).
But Lucifer's Hammer is a good read. I think it's filed under SciFi, but it is pretty light on the Science Fiction.
Babylon 5 tried this in the first season. They had an alien who looked kind of like a praying mantis. The arms, head and mouth were controlled by robotics. The alien was roundly criticized for looking too fake. Nobody mentioned "well at least it didn't look like a human who has been worked on by a make-up artist."
It is expensive to make an alien which doesn't look like a human and isn't criticized for looking fake. Some of the better examples such as Jabba the Hut, Sy Snoodles or Salacious Crumb generally didn't move around and were still very expensive to make.
Somebody tell those non-technical folk to stop making interplanetary satellite probes!
I believe microsoft has sufficiently demonstrated to the people that it now has the political prowess to thwart any legal challenge to how it uses its monopoly. What was it the Bush administration was saying after the newly manned justice department quickly settled the suit? Something like they didn't see why the government was bringing microsoft to trial in the first place? I'm sure somebody has the article stashed away somewhere.
After being found guilty of illegally using their monopoly, they were told to pay a penalty that is less than 10% of what they made breaking the law. If the penalty for stealing $100 is paying a $10 fine, why on earth would you stop stealing $100?
I'm somewhat curious about information other people have to give on this issue. I recall reading an article once (sorry, don't remember exactly where) that in Germany, the "minimum wage" (or whatever their equivalent is) jobs are generally held by resident aliens because the government dole is close enough to that minimum wage that the citizens would rather not take the low paying jobs.
Anybody have better feedback on this? It's hard to validate all this of course because my information comes from American media.
Burglars have successfully sued homeowners for falling through a roof and injuring themselves whilst breaking into said house.
I believe this is a pseudo-urban-legend. Check this article. Scroll down to where it says "Tales of the Absurd". It says:
Ronald Reagan recounted how a cat burglar sued a homeowner for injuries incurred while falling through the homeowner's skylight. When the real case was identified, it turned out that the plaintiff was not a cat burglar at all. He was a high school student who had been sent to retrieve athletic equipment stored on the roof of the school and had fallen through a skylight that had been painted black.
And in a similar vein, this page says:
This particularly news story pointed out that the burglars were mere children, which made it even worse. The facts were these: a group of high school students were playing soccer (or whatever) near their school gym on a weekend. The gym --the entire school -- was closed. They managed to kick the ball up on the roof of the gym. Enterprising boys, they climbed up on the roof, which was clearly forbidden by posted signs. On the roof was a skylight, which had been painted over in the same color as the rest of the roof. The boys didn't notice the skylight, walked on it, and fell through it. THey were injured. The school was held liable for creating a hazard by painting over the skylight: even one of the maintenance staff who had walked on it during school hours would have risked the boys' fate.
A google search on the subject turns up MANY references to a case like this in California where a cat burglar fell through a painted skylight and won. Depending on which item you read he won either because the insurance company settled or because the jury felt the school had failed to make itself safe to burgle. Nobody, not even the article I linked to, provides specifics so one could verify that facts independently. I didn't even get a hit on snopes.
Another interesting hit a I did get is here. An analysis of california's 1996 prop 213 which refers, vaguely, to this court case. Again no specifics are given.
Define "new"... then define "old... in this "technique" context.
6 hours of my time, and probably 80 man hours total could have been saved if exception handling, which is the correct way to deal with this problem, had been implemented to begin with.
Looking through the textbooks and syllabi for the CS courses offered at the local university revealed that none of those courses really cover exception handling. The C++ and Java courses cover what exceptions are and how they are used at the tail end of their curriculum... But unless you are truly interested in writing software, it is something you don't learn until you make a mistake like the above and some technical lead calls you into his office for a "code review".
So you're the guy...
Not like a few years ago when students were enrolling because they wanted to make a quick buck.
Unfortunately the industry is still fat with these people who don't truly appreciate the art and science of software design... and they are determined to make back all that time and money they invested in it during college. Only now they have a couple years of "seniority". It's very disheartening how many companies I see distressed over custom software development because they keep hiring "experts" who write bloated code that doesn't accomplish anything anyway...
I see these kinds of stories too often:
No really, OO is a great tool for rapid development... I don't care what the guy who failed that course tells you -- stop prototyping in purely procedural code! If you had encapsulated that data you could have protected access to it with a semaphore. Now that you need to scale up suddenly your whole application is breaking because your "expert" used simple global variables and you have multiple threads modifying them causing random crashes you can't track down.
If I understand SCO's argument correctly (and I may not, and I'm certainly not an SCO sympathizer)...
The moment a linux kernel was released that had their IP in it, a problem occurred. That code (only the code which violated their IP rights) was said to be GPL, but in fact the submitter had not been given the right to relicense the SCO code in the GPL. The code that violates their IP was therefore never GPL.
I'm not sure how they could be restricted from filing suit against distribution of their IP protected code that is in the kernel but not GPL.
They filed the suit against IBM in March, but they only stopped distributing their own version of Linux on Wednesday of this week!
Even if continued distribution of the kernel represented their giving up their IP rights (which I'm not saying is or is not true), the distribution of their IP prior to discovery is still actionable.