Secondly, GameStop has already been investigated by the FTC for this practice since it's been their company policy FOR YEARS.
Gamestop had a valid explanation no doubt.... removing the valuable disk from the package,
in order to secure it so that it could not easily be stolen.
Most consumers could probably accept this, understanding that the product is just being secured, and not otherwise modified or used.
However..... taking items from the package sold to the customer, and not providing them part of the product; is a different animal, and might be cause for a new FTC investigation.......
Tortious interference with business relationships occurs where the tortfeasor acts to prevent the plaintiff from successfully establishing or maintaining business relationships. This tort may occur when a first party's conduct intentionally causes a second party not to enter into a business relationship with a third party that otherwise would probably have occurred. Such conduct is termed tortious interference with prospective business relations, expectations, or advantage or with prospective economic advantage.
dealerships that get "dealer" tags for cars instead of regular license plates, they (or their spouses or employees or whatever) can drive the car for YEARS
If it's not a dealership company owned car, then they lied (fraud).
If it isowner by their dealership company, then their spouses/whatever driving around the car
making personal use of company property.... incurs a tax liability owed to the IRS; personal use of company property is "income", and if they don't report it... they could go down for tax fraud, which has more serious penalties than lying to a few consumers.
They need a sales tax license, and they need to have the product for "resale" to avoid paying sales tax themselves upon purchase.
VARs (Value added resellers) buy things, add value to them, and resell them all the time, without incurring sales tax liability.
For example, a computer system builder might purchase packs of Redhat licenses to install in the computers that they resell. Sales tax is due on the final product, not the parts that were purchased.
I have little doubt that VRR (Value removed resellers) are still excluded from sales tax, as long as they aren't purchasing the product for their own use, or keeping part of it.
I assume they destroy the coupons that are removed.
They could (oddly) claim they are adding value to the product by removing advertising.
I would suspect that unless *Gamestop* advertises there is a coupon inside, they are not falsely advertising
The 'false advertising' would be the advertisement that we sell this product, this new game; instead of "We sell an open box copy of this product that has some components removed which were contained in the original product"
There is nothing on the box at all about the coupon.
How do you know Square enix hasn't designed a different box version or sticker to attach to boxes they put a coupon in?
If Gamestop has no qualms against breaking open a sealed box; I have little doubt that they'd mind getting a marker and blacking out any mention of 'coupon'.
But all these things make what they're selling a modified product.
If they're selling it as new, with an opened box, they may be running afoul of some consumer protection laws
Actually, IANAL, but is there a legal issue here? If there's a reasonable expectation that every copy of the game includes this coupon and Gamestop are removing it, are they committing fraud or theft or something?
The coupon's part of the package. Meaning it's also part of the product.
If you know from the manufacturer sources that the coupon is part of this product, you go to
Gamestop, buy the product, and open the package to find part of the product missing then
the product is not complete.
This is no different from going to a store, and buying a computer monitor, e.g. you go ask to buy
A sony XXXXXX, and you know that a DVI cable is part of the package, but a store employee
covertly breaks the seal on the package, and steals out the DVI cable and software.
All the way up to.... you went to a store to buy a set of drill bits... you open the box, and the bit you need
was removed by a store employee from the sealed box before they sold it to you as new.
In other words, you should be able to take this back to the store and return this for a refund,
as an incomplete product -- they did not give you what you purchased.
It's the same, whether the item removed is worth 10% or 50% of the product's price.
It's false advertising if they state it's a new product / sealed in box, without informing that it is
an "open box" product.
Fortunately for GS; the product is not a food item or medication, so there is no risk that their
tampering causes bodily injury or death..
if it were, and they broke the seal on the package before purchase, it would be a federal crime
called Tampering with a consumer product.
This another example of 21st century SEO created by the DMCA.
If you search Google for Atari,. their mark, there are a bunch of
pages that show up on Google search that are not Atari.com.
I'll bet that totally pisses off their marketing/sales department, esp. so they
send their legal folks off to "fix it at all costs"
IOW.... possibly PR / "marketing effort" in preparation for new products.
How long before companies start threatening to sue people for sending Tweets or status updates with their company's brand name?
There was no "enforcement", but at a time it was against convention, and it's still against convention and policy for the.ORG TLD, that an ORG domain be registered and utilized for a commercial web site.
Except that ICANN has to abide by rulings made by courts in the US.
That's nice, but ICANN has no authority over it; that all rests with the domain registrar.
So it will depend on which country the registrar is located in.
Keying option 1 means 3 independent keys; K1 K2 K3 that have no relationship between each other; each operation is in CBC mode with independent keys. A block of plaintext to be protected after padding/formatting is first XOR'ed with the previous block encrypted with K1 (or the IV), then itself encrypted with K1, next this block is decrypted with K2 after being XOR'ed with the previous block after K2 decrypt, finally it's XOR'ed with the previous block encrypted with K3, and then encrypted with K3 itself
r1Block[0] = Random_IV1
r2Block[0] = Random_IV2
CipherBlock[0] = Random_IV3
for i from 1 to nblocks...
r1Block[i] = E ( k1, PlainBlock[i] ^ r1Block[i - 1] )
then
r2Block[i] = E ( k2, r1Block[i] ^ r2Block[i - 1] )
then
CipherBlock[i] = E ( k3, r2Block[i] ^ CipherBlock[i-1] )
bzero r1Block
bzero r2Block
bzero PlainBlock
I guess i'm in the wrong for buying an old Apple II machine to turn into a fish tank....
"Only buy current supported products" with a future; sounds like a farcical mantra you hear from
Enterprise IT vendors who want to sell new shiny/glossyware stuff and charge extortionate
fees, not for the product itself, but for annual support or software updates to
fix discovered flaws in the product.
I am suddenly reminded... how much the software industry is a racket...
sell them product once, get them hooked.... then make them pay through the nose every year for basic updates:)
Ask anyone that has been married. Not to be chauvinist but my wife will go through 3 of these in one visit to the shoe store, in stuff she may wear 3 or 5 times tops.
Just because your wife is that far out of control / into rampant consumerism, or feels the two of you are rolling in so much dough that blowing $300 doesn't matter. It's not "anyone that's married".
If you aren't also spending $300 at roughly the same frequency on toys for yourself, then I guess you have an inequitable, probably unhealthy situation; however, there are poorer people who $300 can be a month's wages, and $100 can be the difference between food on table or no.
There are also a lot of people who are divorced, because one or both partners were not willing to show the proper respect for money (Esp. money earned by the other partner), and therefore the couple's financial future.
The number of people who got themselves into a load of debt problems or ruined their retirement spending $100 at a time in "disposable" cash on toys they didn't need, are innumerable.
So yeah... don't even think about buying the HP tablet unless you carefully evaluate and find it worth that much to have a tablet, within your budget
If it looks similar in ornamentation and provides the same functionality, it is in conflict.
Functionality is completely irrelevent, and in fact, if it can be shown that the functionality requires that design, then the design patent is invalid. Design patents do not provide patent protection over functionality or utility;
only the specific visual design is protected.
Any difference in the design, including size differences, can mean the design is not infringing, therefore they are very important.
Much like utility patents do not protect artistic designs; only the patentable method is protected,
not the visual characteristics.
Minor differences can result in the patent not being infringed, even if the overall functionality and appearance of the machine is very similar; because only design patents (and copyright) can protect appearances, and they are both very narrow in what can be protected.
Then yes, Toyota would have a case. The relative size doesn't matter really. If it's similar, it's similar.
When we are talking about design patents, yes, Scale does matter.
In addition, if it can be shown that the design has certain utility, the patent of the design is invalid.
Design patents can be invalidated if the design has practical utility (e.g. the shape of a gear).
Sounds like a trademark lawsuit or UDRP dispute waiting to happen....
Come to think of it... didn't Linus own the trademark to Linux and assign it to the Linux Trademark Institute
with a mind towards prohibiting chicanery like that?
Of any periodicals, I think Linux-oriented rags are excellent candidates to go all digital. I think I'm pretty safe in assuming that the readership is on-line enough that getting their subscription material on-line is a natural step.
Maybe... but the next natural step when they're on-line enough, is to get their 'article fix' from free sources such as blogs, and skip on the pay subscriptions.
a) There's no proof that this will increase the strength, it might weaken it.
There's no possibility it would weaken it. We're not talking about ROT13 here.
If it did "weaken it", that would be equivalent to having found a major flaw in AES... it would mean I could take other people's AES encrypted ciphertext, apply an encrypt and decrypt operations with known keys, and thus weaken an adversary's ciphertext...
Secondly.... if the 3DES approach doesn't "strengthen it" you have also found a flaw in AES; specifically, you've found a ciphertext that AES cannot secure
If you let a paper subscription lapse, you don't have to return the books that you paid for under the subscription.
It might be hard to find articles or search them, but you can keep a copy for as long as your copy survives!
With reasonable treatment and storage conditions, that's upwards of 50 years.
If you have a digital version... they have the ability to pull the old issues at any time; e.g. 10 years from now they might decide to "archive old articles", so you can no longer find them.
Also if you let your subscription lapse, when your web account is disabled,
you lose access to ALL issues, even ones put out last month when you had a subscription to the periodical.
Also, if they go out of business and their website goes away, you lose access to all the articles you
got under the subscription, and will have to pay more if you ever want to see them again,
probably exorbitant fees to a database service or other archival service.
Loss of articles may hurt you if you remember/kept a tab of it, and want to use the info.
either to help you, to show someone else, or for research/paper writing purposes
Perhaps we need to have a higher fee for patents held by someone other than that original assignees, say $5k per year,
How about... start it off at $2000 a year after the date of the original application for patent, and for any year that anyone other than the original assignee holds the patent have a per year scaled cost cost based on number of years since the patent application, to reflect the increased cost to society of tying up that past invention from use by new inventors.
The invention must be really valuable if you're wanting to hold the patent for its entire duration, no?
So... why not charge for that capacity, at increased cost the longer the patent is held
EG
Year 0: $2000
Year 1: $4000
Year 2: $8000
Year 3: $16000
Year 4: $32000
Year 5: $64000
Year 6: $128,000
Year 7: $256,000
Year 8: $512,000
Year 9: $1,024,000
Year 10: $2,048,000
Year 11: $4,096,000
Year 12: $8,192,000
Year 13: $16,384,000
Year 14: $32,768,000
Year 15: $65,536,000
Year 16: $131,072,000
Year 17: $262,144,000
Year 18: $524,288,000
Year 19: $10,485,760,000
Year 20: $20,971,520,000
Year 21: $41,943,040,000
Year 22: $83,886,080,000
Year 23: $167,772,160,000
Year 24: $335,544,320,000
Year 25: $671,088,640,000
Year 26: $1,342,177,280,000
Year 27: $2,684,354,560,000
Year 28: $5,368,709,120,000
Year 29: $10,737,418,240,000
Year 30: $214,748,364,800,000
Year 31: $429,496,729,600,000
Year 32: $858,993,459,200,000
Year 33: $1,717,986,918,400,000
Year 34: $13,743,895,347,200,000
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, GameStop has already been investigated by the FTC for this practice since it's been their company policy FOR YEARS.
Gamestop had a valid explanation no doubt.... removing the valuable disk from the package, in order to secure it so that it could not easily be stolen.
Most consumers could probably accept this, understanding that the product is just being secured, and not otherwise modified or used.
However..... taking items from the package sold to the customer, and not providing them part of the product; is a different animal, and might be cause for a new FTC investigation.......
I'm willing to bet it's most likely in violation of US anti-competition laws, if not product tampering.
Interesting... how about tortious interference with business relationships?
To quote WP,
dealerships that get "dealer" tags for cars instead of regular license plates, they (or their spouses or employees or whatever) can drive the car for YEARS
If it's not a dealership company owned car, then they lied (fraud).
If it isowner by their dealership company, then their spouses/whatever driving around the car making personal use of company property.... incurs a tax liability owed to the IRS; personal use of company property is "income", and if they don't report it... they could go down for tax fraud, which has more serious penalties than lying to a few consumers.
They need a sales tax license, and they need to have the product for "resale" to avoid paying sales tax themselves upon purchase.
VARs (Value added resellers) buy things, add value to them, and resell them all the time, without incurring sales tax liability.
For example, a computer system builder might purchase packs of Redhat licenses to install in the computers that they resell. Sales tax is due on the final product, not the parts that were purchased.
I have little doubt that VRR (Value removed resellers) are still excluded from sales tax, as long as they aren't purchasing the product for their own use, or keeping part of it. I assume they destroy the coupons that are removed.
They could (oddly) claim they are adding value to the product by removing advertising.
I would suspect that unless *Gamestop* advertises there is a coupon inside, they are not falsely advertising
The 'false advertising' would be the advertisement that we sell this product, this new game; instead of "We sell an open box copy of this product that has some components removed which were contained in the original product"
There is nothing on the box at all about the coupon.
How do you know Square enix hasn't designed a different box version or sticker to attach to boxes they put a coupon in?
If Gamestop has no qualms against breaking open a sealed box; I have little doubt that they'd mind getting a marker and blacking out any mention of 'coupon'.
But all these things make what they're selling a modified product. If they're selling it as new, with an opened box, they may be running afoul of some consumer protection laws
If the coupon isn't advertised anywhere, then it may be murkier.
If the coupon were not advertised anywhere, we on Slashdot would probably not know or care about it.
Actually, IANAL, but is there a legal issue here? If there's a reasonable expectation that every copy of the game includes this coupon and Gamestop are removing it, are they committing fraud or theft or something?
The coupon's part of the package. Meaning it's also part of the product.
If you know from the manufacturer sources that the coupon is part of this product, you go to Gamestop, buy the product, and open the package to find part of the product missing then the product is not complete.
This is no different from going to a store, and buying a computer monitor, e.g. you go ask to buy A sony XXXXXX, and you know that a DVI cable is part of the package, but a store employee covertly breaks the seal on the package, and steals out the DVI cable and software.
All the way up to.... you went to a store to buy a set of drill bits... you open the box, and the bit you need was removed by a store employee from the sealed box before they sold it to you as new.
In other words, you should be able to take this back to the store and return this for a refund, as an incomplete product -- they did not give you what you purchased.
It's the same, whether the item removed is worth 10% or 50% of the product's price.
Isn't this tampering with a new product?
It's false advertising if they state it's a new product / sealed in box, without informing that it is an "open box" product.
Fortunately for GS; the product is not a food item or medication, so there is no risk that their tampering causes bodily injury or death.. if it were, and they broke the seal on the package before purchase, it would be a federal crime called Tampering with a consumer product.
This another example of 21st century SEO created by the DMCA.
If you search Google for Atari,. their mark, there are a bunch of pages that show up on Google search that are not Atari.com. I'll bet that totally pisses off their marketing/sales department, esp. so they send their legal folks off to "fix it at all costs"
IOW.... possibly PR / "marketing effort" in preparation for new products.
How long before companies start threatening to sue people for sending Tweets or status updates with their company's brand name?
There was no "enforcement", but at a time it was against convention, and it's still against convention and policy for the .ORG TLD, that an ORG domain be registered and utilized for a commercial web site.
Except that ICANN has to abide by rulings made by courts in the US.
That's nice, but ICANN has no authority over it; that all rests with the domain registrar. So it will depend on which country the registrar is located in.
Keying option 1 means 3 independent keys; K1 K2 K3 that have no relationship between each other; each operation is in CBC mode with independent keys. A block of plaintext to be protected after padding/formatting is first XOR'ed with the previous block encrypted with K1 (or the IV), then itself encrypted with K1, next this block is decrypted with K2 after being XOR'ed with the previous block after K2 decrypt, finally it's XOR'ed with the previous block encrypted with K3, and then encrypted with K3 itself
r1Block[0] = Random_IV1
r2Block[0] = Random_IV2
CipherBlock[0] = Random_IV3
for i from 1 to nblocks...
r1Block[i] = E ( k1, PlainBlock[i] ^ r1Block[i - 1] )
then
r2Block[i] = E ( k2, r1Block[i] ^ r2Block[i - 1] )
then
CipherBlock[i] = E ( k3, r2Block[i] ^ CipherBlock[i-1] )
bzero r1Block
bzero r2Block
bzero PlainBlock
I guess i'm in the wrong for buying an old Apple II machine to turn into a fish tank....
"Only buy current supported products" with a future; sounds like a farcical mantra you hear from Enterprise IT vendors who want to sell new shiny/glossyware stuff and charge extortionate fees, not for the product itself, but for annual support or software updates to fix discovered flaws in the product.
I am suddenly reminded... how much the software industry is a racket... sell them product once, get them hooked.... then make them pay through the nose every year for basic updates :)
Ask anyone that has been married. Not to be chauvinist but my wife will go through 3 of these in one visit to the shoe store, in stuff she may wear 3 or 5 times tops.
Just because your wife is that far out of control / into rampant consumerism, or feels the two of you are rolling in so much dough that blowing $300 doesn't matter. It's not "anyone that's married".
If you aren't also spending $300 at roughly the same frequency on toys for yourself, then I guess you have an inequitable, probably unhealthy situation; however, there are poorer people who $300 can be a month's wages, and $100 can be the difference between food on table or no.
There are also a lot of people who are divorced, because one or both partners were not willing to show the proper respect for money (Esp. money earned by the other partner), and therefore the couple's financial future.
The number of people who got themselves into a load of debt problems or ruined their retirement spending $100 at a time in "disposable" cash on toys they didn't need, are innumerable.
So yeah... don't even think about buying the HP tablet unless you carefully evaluate and find it worth that much to have a tablet, within your budget
If it looks similar in ornamentation and provides the same functionality, it is in conflict.
Functionality is completely irrelevent, and in fact, if it can be shown that the functionality requires that design, then the design patent is invalid. Design patents do not provide patent protection over functionality or utility; only the specific visual design is protected.
Any difference in the design, including size differences, can mean the design is not infringing, therefore they are very important.
Much like utility patents do not protect artistic designs; only the patentable method is protected, not the visual characteristics. Minor differences can result in the patent not being infringed, even if the overall functionality and appearance of the machine is very similar; because only design patents (and copyright) can protect appearances, and they are both very narrow in what can be protected.
Then yes, Toyota would have a case. The relative size doesn't matter really. If it's similar, it's similar.
When we are talking about design patents, yes, Scale does matter.
In addition, if it can be shown that the design has certain utility, the patent of the design is invalid. Design patents can be invalidated if the design has practical utility (e.g. the shape of a gear).
For some reason... I think it would be more funny if Apple tried to photoshop evidence in a suit against Adobe.
You know what i'm saying? Using their own product against them <EG>
It's all command-line anyway; how much resolution do you really need?
You never heard of Xorg, Freedesktop, or KDE?
linuxjournal is squatting linuxgazette.com
Sounds like a trademark lawsuit or UDRP dispute waiting to happen....
Come to think of it... didn't Linus own the trademark to Linux and assign it to the Linux Trademark Institute with a mind towards prohibiting chicanery like that?
Of any periodicals, I think Linux-oriented rags are excellent candidates to go all digital. I think I'm pretty safe in assuming that the readership is on-line enough that getting their subscription material on-line is a natural step.
Maybe... but the next natural step when they're on-line enough, is to get their 'article fix' from free sources such as blogs, and skip on the pay subscriptions.
a) There's no proof that this will increase the strength, it might weaken it.
There's no possibility it would weaken it. We're not talking about ROT13 here.
If it did "weaken it", that would be equivalent to having found a major flaw in AES... it would mean I could take other people's AES encrypted ciphertext, apply an encrypt and decrypt operations with known keys, and thus weaken an adversary's ciphertext...
Secondly.... if the 3DES approach doesn't "strengthen it" you have also found a flaw in AES; specifically, you've found a ciphertext that AES cannot secure
If you let a paper subscription lapse, you don't have to return the books that you paid for under the subscription. It might be hard to find articles or search them, but you can keep a copy for as long as your copy survives! With reasonable treatment and storage conditions, that's upwards of 50 years.
If you have a digital version... they have the ability to pull the old issues at any time; e.g. 10 years from now they might decide to "archive old articles", so you can no longer find them. Also if you let your subscription lapse, when your web account is disabled, you lose access to ALL issues, even ones put out last month when you had a subscription to the periodical.
Also, if they go out of business and their website goes away, you lose access to all the articles you got under the subscription, and will have to pay more if you ever want to see them again, probably exorbitant fees to a database service or other archival service.
Loss of articles may hurt you if you remember/kept a tab of it, and want to use the info. either to help you, to show someone else, or for research/paper writing purposes
Perhaps we need to have a higher fee for patents held by someone other than that original assignees, say $5k per year,
How about... start it off at $2000 a year after the date of the original application for patent, and for any year that anyone other than the original assignee holds the patent have a per year scaled cost cost based on number of years since the patent application, to reflect the increased cost to society of tying up that past invention from use by new inventors. The invention must be really valuable if you're wanting to hold the patent for its entire duration, no? So... why not charge for that capacity, at increased cost the longer the patent is held EG
Year 0: $2000
Year 1: $4000
Year 2: $8000
Year 3: $16000
Year 4: $32000
Year 5: $64000
Year 6: $128,000
Year 7: $256,000
Year 8: $512,000
Year 9: $1,024,000
Year 10: $2,048,000
Year 11: $4,096,000
Year 12: $8,192,000
Year 13: $16,384,000
Year 14: $32,768,000
Year 15: $65,536,000
Year 16: $131,072,000
Year 17: $262,144,000
Year 18: $524,288,000
Year 19: $10,485,760,000
Year 20: $20,971,520,000
Year 21: $41,943,040,000
Year 22: $83,886,080,000
Year 23: $167,772,160,000
Year 24: $335,544,320,000
Year 25: $671,088,640,000
Year 26: $1,342,177,280,000
Year 27: $2,684,354,560,000
Year 28: $5,368,709,120,000
Year 29: $10,737,418,240,000
Year 30: $214,748,364,800,000
Year 31: $429,496,729,600,000
Year 32: $858,993,459,200,000
Year 33: $1,717,986,918,400,000
Year 34: $13,743,895,347,200,000
Or "New attack reduces 256 bit key strength by two bits"
I'm not too worried about it, as i've already switched to Triple-Rjindeal scheme, eg 3AES256 with a keying analogous to 3DES keying option 1
So they're reducing a 768 bit key strength by what, 0.2% ?