The fact that our legal system is so clogged it can't be used by anyone except the rich who can afford an army of lawyers to drown out anyone they don't like is itself a symptom of a much bigger problem.
We CAN rely on the courts for dealing with Trademark and Fraud issues.
The ICANN system can't really be used by anyone but the rich, either.
Did you actually look into how much UDRP process costs? Hint: $5000 is the bare minimum.
To have a chance of winning a UDRP dispute, you really need a lawyer familiar with the process, another $10,000, and rich companies can pay more to basically ensure they win.
The UDRP process is just as corrupt as the "Legal" system.
Also, legitimate trademark uses go beyond use of a domain name.
UDRP process has a lot of 'frivolous' / 'bullying' use cases;
where multiple companies that have the right to the same name exists,
and the bigger one decides they want to take the domain from the smaller company.
Moreover... the use of a domain name alone does not indicate necessarily a trademark problem legally.
The UDRP process can't decide the legal merits of a trademark claim;
they have a list of vague heuristic rules to allow large companies to use UDRP to take domains from individuals or smaller companies, not based on any fairness principal, but based on "arbitration" practices through an arbitration company, which are well known, in the way, these arbitration processes favor large rich companies.
If porn gets its own TLD then why don't gun companies have their own TLD extension?
Because gun companies aren't a popular internet destination. It's NOT porn companies that want a.XXX TLD extension. It is (1) a certain large company that stands to make a mint by operating the.XXX registry, and
(2) domain registrars that stand to make a mint, because they know the popularity of porn destinations, and they hope to sell a lot of domain names, both to companies who don't want someone else to use their name with.XXX and with porn companies, whom they hope will want to compete with each other by purchasing as many.XXX keyword domains as possible to direct traffic to them.
In other words... this is a racket where the domain registrars (and not the community) are in control of the community registry, and are lobbying it to take steps that are most profitable to the "stakeholders"
Because the gun companies haven't gotten together, found a competent registry operator, and
paid the non-refundable $100,000 application fees to ICANN for.ARMS to be considered as a possible new candidate TLD
(keeping in mind, ICANN will only accept a limited number of TLDs for consideration at a time).
Domains really couldn't truly be free forever. When the first troll arrived on the internet, dispute resolution became necessary,
Nonsense... dispute resolution wasn't necessary, for 25 years during which the NIC was in operation, and the internet had broad commercial use for a long time with plenty of trolls, "dispute resolution" and ICANN and came long after the Network Solutions InterNic started charging outlandish prices for domains; the inception of ICANN was in 1998...
There was a very simple dispute resolution process.... file a lawsuit and let the courts sort it out, while preserving the rights of the parties involved. A much fairer, more proper process than what we have today.
There's a much simpler reason domains can't be free though -- the US government stopped funding
the NIC, due to its commercial use - it was deemed the funding has to come from the private sector.
It's not free to run a domain registry, the money has to come from somewhere.
Ideally a non-profit organization would have formed to operate the registry for the benefit of the community;
and the community of ISPs / DNS users would support that registry by utilizing it.
Guess what... that part didn't happen. Turns out there is so much money to be made running a domain
registry, for-profit entities slipped in there first through their existing contracts, lots of money to be made
by treating domain names as tangible items that "expire" or are "rented" at high price instead of community resources
allocated to the registrant, with costs to be recovered from the community of users.
Instead of a "non-profit" central domain registry operated in a manner that bests benefits the entire community
and all registrants.
We have a multitude of for-profit registries... that's the substitute answer.
Instead of providing the community as a whole a single central DNS service that bests serves the community,
a strange idea one out that if we have enough for-profit organizations competing, and all selling the same
registry-operator service with their own markup that is remarkably similar across all registrars (with special
discounts to certain orgs that register hundreds of thousands of superfluous domains), that somehow makes
it "OK".
PETA's utilizing the mark in a non-commercial way that falls under fair use criticism / parody.
Although I would love to see Nintendo send out a DMCA letter against them; maybe draw some attention
to how the DMCA is unfair and suppresses free speech.
He even used Phonedog in his original handle, which further proves that this is "official." If it weren't somehow official, his employer would have claimed trademark violation on his Twitter account while he was still employed.
Obviously... they benefitted from it, so they would not have.
They should have requested he utilize an official Twitter account owned by them to post from.
However, it might have drawn fewer followers if all his postings had to be employer sanctioned postings
approved by marketing.
and if its related to your job but done out side of work time they own it too
No... they own copyright to content you produce related to your job, as "work for hire".
They don't own assets you create outside of work that you use in a manner related to your job.
For example... if your job entails visiting clients; your company doesn't suddenly own your personal car, when you use it one day to drive to a client's office.
If you use your personal e-mail account to contact a prospect that you happen to be friends with, or you provide your e-mail address or personal phone number as contact details for a client, and you wind up signing them up... your company doesn't suddenly own your e-mail account or your home phone number.
They own the work that you provided to them, for example, the sale.
They don't own personal property leveraged to do so.
So... they could own the copyright to all the twitter posts, but it's still your account.
What they could do is demand you take down all the twitter posts from your account that
contain their intellectual property.
Also.... you don't own the Twitter account in the first place, actually, Twitter owns it
their ToS says so:
All right, title, and interest in and to the Services (excluding Content provided by users) are and will remain the exclusive property of Twitter and its licensors..
Cars are not intrinsically conduits for information.
Sure they are. Get in your car, and use it to drive you to the book store or library.
In that sense, computers are not intrinsically conduits for information either.
Give a kid a Commodore 64... sure, they can play with it and tinker with it.
Without resources from the outside world, they won't really have a chance of building their own computer -- they need books, tools, and information.
You can't just pop open a computer never having seen at least pictures of electronics before, and automatically know what each of those electric parts are.
If I had walked out to my garage at 12 and tried to learn how to replace a transmission with nothing more than the car in front of me, I'd probably have nothing more to show for it than a fucked up car.
This is where a mentor comes in. Children don't really learn to do things on their own, efficiently... they need an adult mentor to help them by providing instructions and information.
Either that, or the kid needs good mechnical talent and resources available, such as tools and books.
A kid doesn't start tinkering with cars... they start tinkering with simpler things first.
Facebook's TOS stops applying where the Judge's order starts. Facebook's rules are always overridden by laws. This isn't difficult. Company rules have to follow the law, even when the law is changed right underneath them for something like this.
No. The situation is more complicated than that.
Facebook's ToS is not being adjudicated here.
There are two issues here actually... (1) the disclosure of the password against ToS (the tort that is committed when FB's contract is violated).
(2) the act of using someone else's password to login to FB against ToS (the federal crime
of gaining unauthorized access to a computer system).
Obviously (2) is the larger issue, and the court's order does not make the third party's use of their password authorized access. The court's order would make each spouse an accessory to the crime... which is why the order is illegal.
A court order is invalid if compliance requires committing a crime.
For example: if a judge orders you to kill somebody and signs the order.
No, the order is not valid. And if you carry it out, you still go to jail, although the judge
may bear some responsibility as well.
Also, no... laws changing cannot render existing contracts invalid, in any case.
Contracts can be subject to the law in place when they were agreed upon or last renewed,
but the legislators cannot invalidate an existing legal contract by order or by new changes to the law.
The court should not allow to give unauthorized persons the key to a room i possess without asking me. In fact its not even unlikely that by following the court oder the guy actually would violate some other laws
Logging into Facebook's website using another person's credentials could be
considered wire fraud, violation of the computer fraud and abuse act;
the specific violation being 'gaining unauthorized access'.
Although, the DA is likely to look the other way, with court-ordered abuse.
Your friends might have a problem with this... and the court might have a problem with this...
"pranks" to offend the spouse logging in to your account.
Also, your employer might have a problem with this... if your account doesn't get deleted in short order and they happen
to find your profile at the wrong time....
Login access potentially is... Once you link your FB account to a PayPal account, you can login to FB,
buy credits, and use those credits you have purchased to send various gifts to friends that might sometimes
have monetary value.
And all you have to do to finalize the deletion of the account is to not log into it for 14 days! So all your spouse has to do to prevent your attempt at destruction of evidence is take your password and log in with it!
And if you made a bunch of failed logins to your account using a wrong password until it gets locked out?
Court-ordered swapping of bank account info in divorce cases isn't "next," it's previous - as in it's been a pretty standard order in contested divorce cases for years.
Swapping history records is standard.
How about ordering former-spouses to swap SECRET PIN numbers together with an extra card,
so they can go to an ATM to issue check balance / history, or prove authorization to a teller?
How about ordering former-spouses to swap e-Banking login username, passwords?
How about ordering former-spouses to swap CC numbers, with expiration date and CVV2 code?
Companies don't get to override the law, no contract (in America) part can be held binding if it is against the law. Look up how slavery was outlawed as written into law. [...]
The Facebook TOS is not illegal, and it is a binding contract,
which in the face of FB includes a non-disclosure requirement regarding the account credentials.
The government can't "override" or "strike down" contracts, either.
And a court cannot order you to do anything illegal such as violate a valid contract.
For example, a judge cannot order you to steal something, to deal in a banned product,
a judge cannot order you to commit a crime or violation of the law.
A judge doesn't have the power to issue you an order to kill someone and for it to not be murder.
However, a court can order a witness to divulge information subject to NDA to the court,
if that information is evidence relevant to wrongdoing.
Well, a problem here is... the password itself is not evidence.
And revealing it is a breach.
So what the court wants to do is improper, highly irregular, and not a valid order.
The order they should be issuing is that each spouse divulge all postings made on their FB
account to the court; or the order should be sent to FB for evidence in the form of a subpoena.
Well, he is only ordering the couple to brake the TOS, he isn't giving any order to Facebook itself.
The court is in effect ordering each person in the couple to violate the NDA clause of a contract with a third party....
The fact that parties are not to disclose are the combination of e-mail address and password.
Matters are complicated in that the Facebook credentials provide information not only to the account holders' postings, but
their friends' potentially private postings. Information that should be available to be reviewed only by unbiased third parties. We have an invasion of privacy equivalent to "The litigants will provide each other a photocopy of every item arriving in their mailbox or being mailed out".
Matters are more complicated in that, the "Facebook" password might be reused for other things.
The idea of "order a person to reveal their password" is inherently unfair.
My suggestion for a solution to this would be OpenID type authentication, with biometrics utilized for
authentication.
What the court should instead be doing is using subpoena to compel Facebook to provide
the information related to the different users' postings; the evidence should be subject to review by
lawyers or third parties trusted by the court, without any invasion of privacy by allowing litigants to review
their spouses' private matters.
Their automated system wouldn't know about the court order though, you'd just have to tell them that the account is compromised.
If the court ordered you to hand over your password.
Informing Facebook after you did that, to have Facebook disable your account, would be contempt of court.
(1) There was an order for you to hand over access to your account.
(2) You were aware of the court order to hand over access to your account, as evidenced by the fact you gave the password.
(3) You contacted Facebook to report your account compromised, which would result in your account being disabled.
(4) Disabling access to your account would place you in violation of the order
(5) You knew contacting Facebook would result in your account being disabled, after reading through their policies.
Then pretty much, all they have to do is have evidence that you knew having the account disabled would violate the order, and once they do so... they throw you in jail for contempt of court for reporting your account as compromised to FB.
But if they deleted the account knowing that it's contents were subject to a court order they could certainly be charged with destruction of evidence, which is a felony.
No... spoilation of evidence in a civil case is a civil tort, not a felony.
Although there is a chance, those responsible could be held in contempt of court and penalized
with fines and/or jail time....
In any case it doesn't matter.. as you probably should be aware, when companies like FB "delete" an account, they keep the data, usually on the databases themselves, if not, on the backups.
Otherwise, the court could order Facebook to hand over all the hard drives that their databases are stored on for forensic analysis, so experts hired by the litigants can "analyze" the hard drives and search for deleted data.
FB will have anticipated such things and have backups.
Deleting an account could be equated to shredding documents. Facebook could be charged with failure to comply with a court order and destruction of evidence.
No it couldn't be. You think Facebook actually destroys any data when an account is "deleted" or disabled?
I would bet you all this data is permanently kept for advertising/marketing/profit purposes, and just in case the user might want to reopen their account
There are times when *threatening to sue* is the proper course of action. There are fewer cases where filing a complaint (i.e. initializing a lawsuit) is a proper course of action. It is much, much rarer for suing and going to trial to be the proper course of action.
Probably don't "threaten to sue" in such a situation; get your lawyer to write some warning letters, first of all.
People casually threaten to sue all the time and aren't serious about it -- make sure they know you've done your homework and are serious about pursuing what course you need to best defend yourself from unjust treatment.
and, were the practice to catch on and spread, would erode a central pillar of Silicon Valley culture, in which start-ups with limited cash and a risk of failure dangle the possibility of stock riches in order to lure talent.'"
I think what will happen is Employees will use this case as an example to negotiate better terms.
For example... automatic full vesting of all grants/options, if the employee is fired for any reason not on a short list
and verified by an independent third party auditor.
By "configure", I meant fix all of the above problems - any one of which I view as a critical showstopper issue - by tweaking drivers, startup scripts, and system params.
That's not "configuring"; that's hacking, which is something done by kernel/driver experts, developers, and maybe IT admins to try to make something broken work.
I would say whatever distribution you were using had a bug when it was being utilized on the hardware that you had chosen.
That's not the general state of Linux -- usually things work much better, at least when you are utilizing a recent version on compatible hardware.
Yes... if you have incompatible hardware there is a chance you may be able to hack system parameters to make it work anyways;
don't call that "configuring though"... tweaking driver parameters is an advanced subject.
The existence of broken hardware interfaces that can be made to work with tweaking though, is dismissable as unintentional; either there's a bug in the software, a bug in the driver, or a bug in the hardware -- hardware maker, kernel driver developers share equal responsibility there.
But it's much better than "the hardware deliberately makes alternative OSes not work" because they're not signed, etc, etc
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that our legal system is so clogged it can't be used by anyone except the rich who can afford an army of lawyers to drown out anyone they don't like is itself a symptom of a much bigger problem.
We CAN rely on the courts for dealing with Trademark and Fraud issues.
The ICANN system can't really be used by anyone but the rich, either. Did you actually look into how much UDRP process costs? Hint: $5000 is the bare minimum.
To have a chance of winning a UDRP dispute, you really need a lawyer familiar with the process, another $10,000, and rich companies can pay more to basically ensure they win. The UDRP process is just as corrupt as the "Legal" system.
Also, legitimate trademark uses go beyond use of a domain name. UDRP process has a lot of 'frivolous' / 'bullying' use cases; where multiple companies that have the right to the same name exists, and the bigger one decides they want to take the domain from the smaller company.
Moreover... the use of a domain name alone does not indicate necessarily a trademark problem legally. The UDRP process can't decide the legal merits of a trademark claim; they have a list of vague heuristic rules to allow large companies to use UDRP to take domains from individuals or smaller companies, not based on any fairness principal, but based on "arbitration" practices through an arbitration company, which are well known, in the way, these arbitration processes favor large rich companies.
If porn gets its own TLD then why don't gun companies have their own TLD extension?
Because gun companies aren't a popular internet destination. It's NOT porn companies that want a .XXX TLD extension. It is (1) a certain large company that stands to make a mint by operating the .XXX registry, and
.XXX and with porn companies, whom they hope will want to compete with each other by purchasing as many .XXX keyword domains as possible to direct traffic to them.
(2) domain registrars that stand to make a mint, because they know the popularity of porn destinations, and they hope to sell a lot of domain names, both to companies who don't want someone else to use their name with
In other words... this is a racket where the domain registrars (and not the community) are in control of the community registry, and are lobbying it to take steps that are most profitable to the "stakeholders"
Because the gun companies haven't gotten together, found a competent registry operator, and paid the non-refundable $100,000 application fees to ICANN for .ARMS to be considered as a possible new candidate TLD
(keeping in mind, ICANN will only accept a limited number of TLDs for consideration at a time).
Domains really couldn't truly be free forever. When the first troll arrived on the internet, dispute resolution became necessary,
Nonsense... dispute resolution wasn't necessary, for 25 years during which the NIC was in operation, and the internet had broad commercial use for a long time with plenty of trolls, "dispute resolution" and ICANN and came long after the Network Solutions InterNic started charging outlandish prices for domains; the inception of ICANN was in 1998...
There was a very simple dispute resolution process.... file a lawsuit and let the courts sort it out, while preserving the rights of the parties involved. A much fairer, more proper process than what we have today.
There's a much simpler reason domains can't be free though -- the US government stopped funding the NIC, due to its commercial use - it was deemed the funding has to come from the private sector.
It's not free to run a domain registry, the money has to come from somewhere.
Ideally a non-profit organization would have formed to operate the registry for the benefit of the community; and the community of ISPs / DNS users would support that registry by utilizing it.
Guess what... that part didn't happen. Turns out there is so much money to be made running a domain registry, for-profit entities slipped in there first through their existing contracts, lots of money to be made by treating domain names as tangible items that "expire" or are "rented" at high price instead of community resources allocated to the registrant, with costs to be recovered from the community of users.
Instead of a "non-profit" central domain registry operated in a manner that bests benefits the entire community and all registrants.
We have a multitude of for-profit registries... that's the substitute answer. Instead of providing the community as a whole a single central DNS service that bests serves the community, a strange idea one out that if we have enough for-profit organizations competing, and all selling the same registry-operator service with their own markup that is remarkably similar across all registrars (with special discounts to certain orgs that register hundreds of thousands of superfluous domains), that somehow makes it "OK".
If they were only charging a nominal fee, such as $1/year, noone would be complaining. The high fee is the extortionate part.
We sure know it doesn't reasonably cost $200 a year per domain to create and maintain the database entry, answer queries, and provide WHOIS service.
The high fee is purely opportunistic price gouging. Hurry up and buy, before we let the general public take your name.
PETA's utilizing the mark in a non-commercial way that falls under fair use criticism / parody.
Although I would love to see Nintendo send out a DMCA letter against them; maybe draw some attention to how the DMCA is unfair and suppresses free speech.
He even used Phonedog in his original handle, which further proves that this is "official." If it weren't somehow official, his employer would have claimed trademark violation on his Twitter account while he was still employed.
Obviously... they benefitted from it, so they would not have.
They should have requested he utilize an official Twitter account owned by them to post from.
However, it might have drawn fewer followers if all his postings had to be employer sanctioned postings approved by marketing.
and if its related to your job but done out side of work time they own it too
No... they own copyright to content you produce related to your job, as "work for hire". They don't own assets you create outside of work that you use in a manner related to your job.
For example... if your job entails visiting clients; your company doesn't suddenly own your personal car, when you use it one day to drive to a client's office. If you use your personal e-mail account to contact a prospect that you happen to be friends with, or you provide your e-mail address or personal phone number as contact details for a client, and you wind up signing them up... your company doesn't suddenly own your e-mail account or your home phone number.
They own the work that you provided to them, for example, the sale. They don't own personal property leveraged to do so.
So... they could own the copyright to all the twitter posts, but it's still your account. What they could do is demand you take down all the twitter posts from your account that contain their intellectual property.
Also.... you don't own the Twitter account in the first place, actually, Twitter owns it their ToS says so: All right, title, and interest in and to the Services (excluding Content provided by users) are and will remain the exclusive property of Twitter and its licensors..
Cars are not intrinsically conduits for information.
Sure they are. Get in your car, and use it to drive you to the book store or library.
In that sense, computers are not intrinsically conduits for information either. Give a kid a Commodore 64... sure, they can play with it and tinker with it. Without resources from the outside world, they won't really have a chance of building their own computer -- they need books, tools, and information.
You can't just pop open a computer never having seen at least pictures of electronics before, and automatically know what each of those electric parts are.
If I had walked out to my garage at 12 and tried to learn how to replace a transmission with nothing more than the car in front of me, I'd probably have nothing more to show for it than a fucked up car.
This is where a mentor comes in. Children don't really learn to do things on their own, efficiently... they need an adult mentor to help them by providing instructions and information.
Either that, or the kid needs good mechnical talent and resources available, such as tools and books.
A kid doesn't start tinkering with cars... they start tinkering with simpler things first.
That's why someone ELSE not related to the case reports the account.
You really think you can tell a friend to report your account and evade the wrath of the court?
Nope... the court will likely depose the person, after subpoena'ing info from FB, and upon determining the facts, you will be penalized by the court.
Facebook's TOS stops applying where the Judge's order starts. Facebook's rules are always overridden by laws. This isn't difficult. Company rules have to follow the law, even when the law is changed right underneath them for something like this.
No. The situation is more complicated than that. Facebook's ToS is not being adjudicated here. There are two issues here actually... (1) the disclosure of the password against ToS (the tort that is committed when FB's contract is violated). (2) the act of using someone else's password to login to FB against ToS (the federal crime of gaining unauthorized access to a computer system). Obviously (2) is the larger issue, and the court's order does not make the third party's use of their password authorized access. The court's order would make each spouse an accessory to the crime... which is why the order is illegal.
A court order is invalid if compliance requires committing a crime.
For example: if a judge orders you to kill somebody and signs the order. No, the order is not valid. And if you carry it out, you still go to jail, although the judge may bear some responsibility as well.
Also, no... laws changing cannot render existing contracts invalid, in any case. Contracts can be subject to the law in place when they were agreed upon or last renewed, but the legislators cannot invalidate an existing legal contract by order or by new changes to the law.
The court should not allow to give unauthorized persons the key to a room i possess without asking me. In fact its not even unlikely that by following the court oder the guy actually would violate some other laws
Logging into Facebook's website using another person's credentials could be considered wire fraud, violation of the computer fraud and abuse act; the specific violation being 'gaining unauthorized access'.
Although, the DA is likely to look the other way, with court-ordered abuse.
Your friends might have a problem with this... and the court might have a problem with this... "pranks" to offend the spouse logging in to your account.
Also, your employer might have a problem with this... if your account doesn't get deleted in short order and they happen to find your profile at the wrong time....
Login access potentially is... Once you link your FB account to a PayPal account, you can login to FB, buy credits, and use those credits you have purchased to send various gifts to friends that might sometimes have monetary value.
And all you have to do to finalize the deletion of the account is to not log into it for 14 days! So all your spouse has to do to prevent your attempt at destruction of evidence is take your password and log in with it!
And if you made a bunch of failed logins to your account using a wrong password until it gets locked out?
Court-ordered swapping of bank account info in divorce cases isn't "next," it's previous - as in it's been a pretty standard order in contested divorce cases for years.
Swapping history records is standard.
How about ordering former-spouses to swap SECRET PIN numbers together with an extra card, so they can go to an ATM to issue check balance / history, or prove authorization to a teller? How about ordering former-spouses to swap e-Banking login username, passwords?
How about ordering former-spouses to swap CC numbers, with expiration date and CVV2 code?
I don't think so.
Companies don't get to override the law, no contract (in America) part can be held binding if it is against the law. Look up how slavery was outlawed as written into law. [...]
The Facebook TOS is not illegal, and it is a binding contract, which in the face of FB includes a non-disclosure requirement regarding the account credentials.
The government can't "override" or "strike down" contracts, either. And a court cannot order you to do anything illegal such as violate a valid contract. For example, a judge cannot order you to steal something, to deal in a banned product, a judge cannot order you to commit a crime or violation of the law.
A judge doesn't have the power to issue you an order to kill someone and for it to not be murder.
However, a court can order a witness to divulge information subject to NDA to the court, if that information is evidence relevant to wrongdoing.
Well, a problem here is... the password itself is not evidence. And revealing it is a breach.
So what the court wants to do is improper, highly irregular, and not a valid order. The order they should be issuing is that each spouse divulge all postings made on their FB account to the court; or the order should be sent to FB for evidence in the form of a subpoena.
If the law was fair (no-fault divorce) then none of this would be a problem.
It's an avoidable problem... the solution is simple.
Don't marry.
Then there can be no divorce, 'fault' or otherwise
Well, he is only ordering the couple to brake the TOS, he isn't giving any order to Facebook itself.
The court is in effect ordering each person in the couple to violate the NDA clause of a contract with a third party....
The fact that parties are not to disclose are the combination of e-mail address and password.
Matters are complicated in that the Facebook credentials provide information not only to the account holders' postings, but their friends' potentially private postings. Information that should be available to be reviewed only by unbiased third parties. We have an invasion of privacy equivalent to "The litigants will provide each other a photocopy of every item arriving in their mailbox or being mailed out".
Matters are more complicated in that, the "Facebook" password might be reused for other things. The idea of "order a person to reveal their password" is inherently unfair.
My suggestion for a solution to this would be OpenID type authentication, with biometrics utilized for authentication.
What the court should instead be doing is using subpoena to compel Facebook to provide the information related to the different users' postings; the evidence should be subject to review by lawyers or third parties trusted by the court, without any invasion of privacy by allowing litigants to review their spouses' private matters.
Their automated system wouldn't know about the court order though, you'd just have to tell them that the account is compromised.
If the court ordered you to hand over your password. Informing Facebook after you did that, to have Facebook disable your account, would be contempt of court.
(1) There was an order for you to hand over access to your account.
(2) You were aware of the court order to hand over access to your account, as evidenced by the fact you gave the password.
(3) You contacted Facebook to report your account compromised, which would result in your account being disabled.
(4) Disabling access to your account would place you in violation of the order
(5) You knew contacting Facebook would result in your account being disabled, after reading through their policies.
Then pretty much, all they have to do is have evidence that you knew having the account disabled would violate the order, and once they do so... they throw you in jail for contempt of court for reporting your account as compromised to FB.
But if they deleted the account knowing that it's contents were subject to a court order they could certainly be charged with destruction of evidence, which is a felony.
No... spoilation of evidence in a civil case is a civil tort, not a felony. Although there is a chance, those responsible could be held in contempt of court and penalized with fines and/or jail time....
In any case it doesn't matter.. as you probably should be aware, when companies like FB "delete" an account, they keep the data, usually on the databases themselves, if not, on the backups.
Otherwise, the court could order Facebook to hand over all the hard drives that their databases are stored on for forensic analysis, so experts hired by the litigants can "analyze" the hard drives and search for deleted data.
FB will have anticipated such things and have backups.
Deleting an account could be equated to shredding documents. Facebook could be charged with failure to comply with a court order and destruction of evidence.
No it couldn't be. You think Facebook actually destroys any data when an account is "deleted" or disabled?
I would bet you all this data is permanently kept for advertising/marketing/profit purposes, and just in case the user might want to reopen their account
There are times when *threatening to sue* is the proper course of action. There are fewer cases where filing a complaint (i.e. initializing a lawsuit) is a proper course of action. It is much, much rarer for suing and going to trial to be the proper course of action.
Probably don't "threaten to sue" in such a situation; get your lawyer to write some warning letters, first of all.
People casually threaten to sue all the time and aren't serious about it -- make sure they know you've done your homework and are serious about pursuing what course you need to best defend yourself from unjust treatment.
and, were the practice to catch on and spread, would erode a central pillar of Silicon Valley culture, in which start-ups with limited cash and a risk of failure dangle the possibility of stock riches in order to lure talent.'"
I think what will happen is Employees will use this case as an example to negotiate better terms. For example... automatic full vesting of all grants/options, if the employee is fired for any reason not on a short list and verified by an independent third party auditor.
By "configure", I meant fix all of the above problems - any one of which I view as a critical showstopper issue - by tweaking drivers, startup scripts, and system params.
That's not "configuring"; that's hacking, which is something done by kernel/driver experts, developers, and maybe IT admins to try to make something broken work.
I would say whatever distribution you were using had a bug when it was being utilized on the hardware that you had chosen.
That's not the general state of Linux -- usually things work much better, at least when you are utilizing a recent version on compatible hardware.
Yes... if you have incompatible hardware there is a chance you may be able to hack system parameters to make it work anyways; don't call that "configuring though"... tweaking driver parameters is an advanced subject.
The existence of broken hardware interfaces that can be made to work with tweaking though, is dismissable as unintentional; either there's a bug in the software, a bug in the driver, or a bug in the hardware -- hardware maker, kernel driver developers share equal responsibility there.
But it's much better than "the hardware deliberately makes alternative OSes not work" because they're not signed, etc, etc