Not because they invented it (who is claiming that?) but because they have packaged it in a way that makes it accessible and in a way that works, in the same way that Bell Labs did with the ideas behind the transistor.
Except that it isn't the way they "packaged" it either. Siri-under-Apple is really not so different than Siri-before-Apple. What Apple has done is marketed it.
You can probably claim that good marketing can cause a revolution by sparking popular interest in a thing and do it without strictly lying, but it's good to keep in mind that it isn't Apple's products or engineering causing that, it's their RDF.
The anonymous commenter may simply choose to have the statement removed and go post it somewhere else.
But how does that get you anywhere? The webmaster is not in a position to determine whether alleged defamation is actually defamation. You still have a situation where an anonymous commenter posting a truthful statement is given the choice between being silenced and being unmasked.
They've managed to convince a few judges (you know, actual legal experts) that not only are Samsung's products probably infringing, but they certainly have a right to complain about it.
You're conflating what it takes to get a preliminary injunction with who will win on the merits.
Plaintiffs tend to win preliminary injunctions because they happen early in the process: The plaintiff can take as long as they like to get all their ducks in a row and do all their research before they file the lawsuit, then the defendant has a short period of time to defend against the motion for an injunction (which comes almost right away), which gives the plaintiff a large advantage at that stage because they've had more time to prepare.
The real question is what happens at the trial and appeal, once Samsung has had time to do its homework and come up with a list of prior art, a list of other companies that have been using similar "trademarks" that Apple hasn't been policing or that have prior dates of first use than Apple, and some fleshed out legal arguments about why what they're claiming is unsuitable subject matter for a trademark etc.
I don't see how that changes it either. The question is not whether the price of the iPad would have been less without the subscription. The question is whether the iPad users would have bought the subscription if it had an additional cost, as distinguished from buying an iPad and receiving a subscription they would not otherwise have paid for.
Put it a different way: If every iPad user gets a "paid" subscription but without paying additional money, you aren't measuring the number of paid subscriptions, you're measuring the number of iPads.
You're confusing absolute truth with what has been proven. Anyone can make a spurious claim of defamation, but you don't know whether it's true until you've heard from both sides -- which the court can't do until they know the identity of the anonymous poster. The problem is that you have to make the decision whether to reveal them prior to the decision on whether it's defamation, and if it turns out not to be defamation then it's too late to go back and give the poster back their anonymity.
This is especially problematic with pseudonymous posters who post repeatedly under the same pseudonym: An aggressor can find one post that contains a bit of an exaggeration about him, claim defamation and find the poster's identity. Then he can drop the case or not, but having the identity he can take revenge outside of court through whatever means available.
Some sort of safe harbour/temporary hold system seems to be working better than anything we had before in the broadly similar context of copyright infringement, so I don't think that's an absurd place to start.
You're assuming that it works well in the case of copyright. As it turns out, not so much. You run into a whole list of problems:
-The service provider intermediaries don't have much incentive to defend their users when they can only do it by giving up the safe harbor and going to court, especially when they don't have any good way of determining who is in the right, so they generally take down anything no matter how ridiculous the request is.
-Temporarily taking down the material prevents it from having an impact. If the material is false, that's good. If the material is true, that's bad. Since you don't know whether it's true or not at the outset, you can't say whether it should be taken down. And sometimes "put it back later" just doesn't cut it: If the information is relevant to an upcoming deadline, like a vote or election, putting it up after the deadline isn't good enough. (That paper uses a true example about John McCain having his campaign videos taken down shortly before the 2008 election on the basis of spurious infringement claims.)
-The notice and take-down process requires the user to reveal their identity to have the material put back up. If the issuer of the take-down is a dangerous person, the user may fear for their safety if they reveal their identity, which will cause them not to issue a counter-notice even if the take-down is completely bogus.
-On a similar note, even if the user is completely in the right and willing to stand by their words, they may not be able to afford the litigation costs. The cost of defending a lawsuit puts the fear of bankruptcy into anyone who is telling the truth but isn't a member of the investment class. Free speech is not meant to be a right exclusive to the rich.
The paper goes through a number of other problems if you're interested.
See, that's the whole problem. It isn't "the defamed" who can make the accusation, it's someone who alleges they were harmed by an untrue statement. Which is in general to say, anyone with an incentive to make the information go away. Especially if they expect that the poster will be afraid of them and won't defend the truth of the statement if it means revealing their identity.
so you can see that if the provider believes the information to have merit they can get a judge to investigate without the need to expose the anonymous poster.
The trouble is that the ISP has no better way of knowing whether the statement is true than the court does. And how many money-grubbing ISPs do you know that are willing to stick their neck out and do the right thing, if misjudging the truth of the statement will cost them a pile of cash?
Your example shows how laws of the proposed kind create the worst combination of outcomes: If someone posts something like that, by the time the target reads it, hires a lawyer and gets the court to remove it, most of the damage is done. Everybody has read it already. Having the ISP reveal that it was posted at some public library will not bring anyone to justice.
Now imagine if the same statement is made, but it is true. The dangerous child abusing criminal makes an accusation of libel and the poster is afraid to reveal their identity out of fear for their own safety. Now the true information is removed and it becomes easier for the criminal to continue abusing children. And if you create a law that forces the ISP to reveal the poster's location then you deter people from posting true information about dangerous people in the first place.
You have a human right to anonymously post true information. The problem is that this comes into conflict, not with libel laws, but with their enforcement: Someone whose identity is unknown cannot defend themselves against a charge of libel. So we have a problem: If we force the anonymous poster to reveal his identity in order to defend the truth of his statements, there is no longer the ability to have truthful anonymous speech -- anyone can make the accusation and force the poster to choose between the ability to be anonymous and the ability to communicate. But if we allow the post to stand because of that, you have something that is potentially libelous (but not proven to be in an adversary proceeding), which continues to be available.
Now if you throw in the fact that a post by someone anonymous will have extremely low credibility unless it can be independently verified, which mitigates the damage done by a potentially libelous statement, it weighs strongly in favor of protecting anonymous speech at the expense of people having to grow thicker skin.
This is better than the current situation, where Slashdot would be seen as responsible even before they failed to take down the anonymous comment.
Is that the current situation? It would seem like if it was then Slashdot would not still be here.
(Basically, the law requires that *someone* accept responsibility for remarks so that they can be sued; if you want to let people post lies anonymously, then the website has to accept the responsibility for them.)
And if you want to post the truth anonymously so that those whose crimes you're disclosing can't retaliate, well, sucks to be you apparently.
Six seconds is long enough to look at close to the whole first page of results. The idea that people could be searching for something and then give up without even looking at the organic results is hard to believe.
And then your links contradict your principle. If good use of screen real estate is so vital to user experience then how can you preserve the user experience while putting a conspicuous choice between different e.g. map providers on the search page, in the place where a much more useful actual map would be? It has to be one way or the other.
Of course, the guy admits that he works for Google's competitors, so it's not like he has no financial stake in the matter.
No, it's an ad legality issue. The ads are targeted -- if they're doing it right the people who see them are the ones who are looking for them, whether the advertiser's product is legal or not. And let's be honest, the only reason it's illegal to buy from Canadian pharmacies is that the US drug companies lobbied for it to be. It's not like there is any moral justification for it.
Since Google started putting ads above search results, in the same column, the distinction between the two is not that great. Especially when the ad results, the places results, and the in-house Google results combine to push the organic results below the fold and unlikely to be clicked.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? The only reason anybody would ever not reach the organic results is if the targeted ads showed them the thing they were searching for first. If that's the case, you can hardly call it a reduction in search quality -- it has the thing the user wanted at the top.
Google search quality efforts are mostly "window dressing", as the U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island put it in his statement about Google's non-prosecution agreement. [mainjustice.com] When ad revenue conflicts with search quality, ad revenue wins. Prof. Ben Eidelman of the Harvard Business School [benedelman.org] has analyzed this in detail.
Do you even read your own links? Neither of those is talking about search quality whatsoever.
In this case the paper edition is cheaper comes with the more expensive on line version free. That seems pretty backwards/
It isn't particularly backwards when you realize that they make more from print advertisers to have one additional 'paid' print subscriber than it costs them to actually print and deliver one additional copy.
If you buy the online-only subscription you're costing them ad revenue.
You might notice that the truth of that statement does not dispute the argument that the number of subscribers is inflated by those who were not given the choice of declining the subscription in exchange for a price reduction on the iPad.
I'd agree with you if Apple were suing EVERYONE who makes black rectangles, but they're not.
But they wouldn't anyway. Samsung's aim is to make a product that feels familiar to Apple's customers. There is a significant difference between confusion and familiarity -- you can be quite aware that something is made by a different manufacturer and yet buy it because you know that when you intentionally switch, you don't have to learn an entirely new set of icons and interface conventions. That's not trademark infringement, it's competition.
Naturally Apple would like nothing more than to prevent that. But nobody wants to file a lawsuit against a dozen huge manufacturing giants, especially with a questionable case. Better to only go after the one most similar to yours and make an example of them, so that anybody else who dares to target a product at the aggressor's customer base will think twice.
The problem is it isn't at all clear that Apple has any right to do that. They're arguing consumer confusion. But nobody is going to the store and buying a Galaxy Tab thinking it's an iPad. Just making something similar is not illegal, it's the basis of the free market -- Apple has to have a valid and infringed monopoly right in order to prevent competition. And it isn't clear that they do.
Even Samsung seems to realize it - they've managed to change the Nexus Galaxy and I don't think they believe the function was compromised.
Well, certainly they've realized that someone with a right you claim is invalid can get a judge to order you to stop selling your product before you get a chance to show the court why it's invalid. Which is no doubt much to the delight of Apple -- but that doesn't make Apple right. It only makes them a successful bully.
Most of that Trillion ain't government backed . . . but student loan laws have been made lot tougher, even total bankruptcy doesn't erase the debt.
Which is an even worse action of the government. It's debt slavery. Even if the money isn't backed by the treasury, if it's backed by the courts with no opportunity to discharge the debt then one way or another either the bank gets their money or the borrower dies penniless.
What it did was make it so that a business had to prove a business need for a test that had the effect of discriminating against a minority group. And since African Americans are statistically poorer and attend worse schools, any test that measures intelligence or the quality of someone's primary education will tend to have that impact.
And since proving the business need for an intelligence test by going to court was both extremely expensive and fraught with uncertainty, employers abandoned testing to weed out new employees and started using degrees instead. (Which had the effect of discriminating even more against minorities, who tend to be less affluent and therefore less able to afford college.)
Having the source to the drivers would be preferable as then they could be improved as well, but nothing other than being a purist stops you from using the binary blobs as-is and improving the code that is open source.
To reiterate, these servers contain only the ‘gingerbread’ and ‘master’
branches from the old AOSP servers. We plan to release the source for the
recently-announced Ice Cream Sandwich soon, once it’s available on devices.
Apple sues Samsung. Samsung argues that Apple's patents are invalid. The judge says that the patents are presumed valid and orders Samsung to stop selling their product while it conducts a trial to determine whether they are in actuality invalid. Three years later when Samsung finally wins, they are finally allowed to sell the three-year-old product that nobody wants anymore.
Or, they can design a new product that doesn't infringe the allegedly invalid patents and then start selling it right away.
So what thing useful to Apple's lawyers do you imagine that Samsung admitted? That the legal system is so flawed that a vendor can be forced to redesign their products to avoid an invalid patent?
Slashdot Mirror
destroying existence of pop
Feature, not bug. Feature.
Not because they invented it (who is claiming that?) but because they have packaged it in a way that makes it accessible and in a way that works, in the same way that Bell Labs did with the ideas behind the transistor.
Except that it isn't the way they "packaged" it either. Siri-under-Apple is really not so different than Siri-before-Apple. What Apple has done is marketed it.
You can probably claim that good marketing can cause a revolution by sparking popular interest in a thing and do it without strictly lying, but it's good to keep in mind that it isn't Apple's products or engineering causing that, it's their RDF.
Most phones designed prior to large touch screens becoming cost-effective did not employ large touch screens. News at 11.
The anonymous commenter may simply choose to have the statement removed and go post it somewhere else.
But how does that get you anywhere? The webmaster is not in a position to determine whether alleged defamation is actually defamation. You still have a situation where an anonymous commenter posting a truthful statement is given the choice between being silenced and being unmasked.
They've managed to convince a few judges (you know, actual legal experts) that not only are Samsung's products probably infringing, but they certainly have a right to complain about it.
You're conflating what it takes to get a preliminary injunction with who will win on the merits.
Plaintiffs tend to win preliminary injunctions because they happen early in the process: The plaintiff can take as long as they like to get all their ducks in a row and do all their research before they file the lawsuit, then the defendant has a short period of time to defend against the motion for an injunction (which comes almost right away), which gives the plaintiff a large advantage at that stage because they've had more time to prepare.
The real question is what happens at the trial and appeal, once Samsung has had time to do its homework and come up with a list of prior art, a list of other companies that have been using similar "trademarks" that Apple hasn't been policing or that have prior dates of first use than Apple, and some fleshed out legal arguments about why what they're claiming is unsuitable subject matter for a trademark etc.
I don't see how that changes it either. The question is not whether the price of the iPad would have been less without the subscription. The question is whether the iPad users would have bought the subscription if it had an additional cost, as distinguished from buying an iPad and receiving a subscription they would not otherwise have paid for.
Put it a different way: If every iPad user gets a "paid" subscription but without paying additional money, you aren't measuring the number of paid subscriptions, you're measuring the number of iPads.
Either it's defamation or it isn't.
You're confusing absolute truth with what has been proven. Anyone can make a spurious claim of defamation, but you don't know whether it's true until you've heard from both sides -- which the court can't do until they know the identity of the anonymous poster. The problem is that you have to make the decision whether to reveal them prior to the decision on whether it's defamation, and if it turns out not to be defamation then it's too late to go back and give the poster back their anonymity.
This is especially problematic with pseudonymous posters who post repeatedly under the same pseudonym: An aggressor can find one post that contains a bit of an exaggeration about him, claim defamation and find the poster's identity. Then he can drop the case or not, but having the identity he can take revenge outside of court through whatever means available.
Some sort of safe harbour/temporary hold system seems to be working better than anything we had before in the broadly similar context of copyright infringement, so I don't think that's an absurd place to start.
You're assuming that it works well in the case of copyright. As it turns out, not so much. You run into a whole list of problems:
-The service provider intermediaries don't have much incentive to defend their users when they can only do it by giving up the safe harbor and going to court, especially when they don't have any good way of determining who is in the right, so they generally take down anything no matter how ridiculous the request is.
-Temporarily taking down the material prevents it from having an impact. If the material is false, that's good. If the material is true, that's bad. Since you don't know whether it's true or not at the outset, you can't say whether it should be taken down. And sometimes "put it back later" just doesn't cut it: If the information is relevant to an upcoming deadline, like a vote or election, putting it up after the deadline isn't good enough. (That paper uses a true example about John McCain having his campaign videos taken down shortly before the 2008 election on the basis of spurious infringement claims.)
-The notice and take-down process requires the user to reveal their identity to have the material put back up. If the issuer of the take-down is a dangerous person, the user may fear for their safety if they reveal their identity, which will cause them not to issue a counter-notice even if the take-down is completely bogus.
-On a similar note, even if the user is completely in the right and willing to stand by their words, they may not be able to afford the litigation costs. The cost of defending a lawsuit puts the fear of bankruptcy into anyone who is telling the truth but isn't a member of the investment class. Free speech is not meant to be a right exclusive to the rich.
The paper goes through a number of other problems if you're interested.
No, only the defamed can
See, that's the whole problem. It isn't "the defamed" who can make the accusation, it's someone who alleges they were harmed by an untrue statement. Which is in general to say, anyone with an incentive to make the information go away. Especially if they expect that the poster will be afraid of them and won't defend the truth of the statement if it means revealing their identity.
so you can see that if the provider believes the information to have merit they can get a judge to investigate without the need to expose the anonymous poster.
The trouble is that the ISP has no better way of knowing whether the statement is true than the court does. And how many money-grubbing ISPs do you know that are willing to stick their neck out and do the right thing, if misjudging the truth of the statement will cost them a pile of cash?
Your example shows how laws of the proposed kind create the worst combination of outcomes: If someone posts something like that, by the time the target reads it, hires a lawyer and gets the court to remove it, most of the damage is done. Everybody has read it already. Having the ISP reveal that it was posted at some public library will not bring anyone to justice.
Now imagine if the same statement is made, but it is true. The dangerous child abusing criminal makes an accusation of libel and the poster is afraid to reveal their identity out of fear for their own safety. Now the true information is removed and it becomes easier for the criminal to continue abusing children. And if you create a law that forces the ISP to reveal the poster's location then you deter people from posting true information about dangerous people in the first place.
Free speech ends at libel and slander.
You have a human right to anonymously post true information. The problem is that this comes into conflict, not with libel laws, but with their enforcement: Someone whose identity is unknown cannot defend themselves against a charge of libel. So we have a problem: If we force the anonymous poster to reveal his identity in order to defend the truth of his statements, there is no longer the ability to have truthful anonymous speech -- anyone can make the accusation and force the poster to choose between the ability to be anonymous and the ability to communicate. But if we allow the post to stand because of that, you have something that is potentially libelous (but not proven to be in an adversary proceeding), which continues to be available.
Now if you throw in the fact that a post by someone anonymous will have extremely low credibility unless it can be independently verified, which mitigates the damage done by a potentially libelous statement, it weighs strongly in favor of protecting anonymous speech at the expense of people having to grow thicker skin.
This is better than the current situation, where Slashdot would be seen as responsible even before they failed to take down the anonymous comment.
Is that the current situation? It would seem like if it was then Slashdot would not still be here.
(Basically, the law requires that *someone* accept responsibility for remarks so that they can be sued; if you want to let people post lies anonymously, then the website has to accept the responsibility for them.)
And if you want to post the truth anonymously so that those whose crimes you're disclosing can't retaliate, well, sucks to be you apparently.
Six seconds is long enough to look at close to the whole first page of results. The idea that people could be searching for something and then give up without even looking at the organic results is hard to believe.
And then your links contradict your principle. If good use of screen real estate is so vital to user experience then how can you preserve the user experience while putting a conspicuous choice between different e.g. map providers on the search page, in the place where a much more useful actual map would be? It has to be one way or the other.
Of course, the guy admits that he works for Google's competitors, so it's not like he has no financial stake in the matter.
Yes, that's an ad quality issue.
No, it's an ad legality issue. The ads are targeted -- if they're doing it right the people who see them are the ones who are looking for them, whether the advertiser's product is legal or not. And let's be honest, the only reason it's illegal to buy from Canadian pharmacies is that the US drug companies lobbied for it to be. It's not like there is any moral justification for it.
Since Google started putting ads above search results, in the same column, the distinction between the two is not that great. Especially when the ad results, the places results, and the in-house Google results combine to push the organic results below the fold and unlikely to be clicked.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? The only reason anybody would ever not reach the organic results is if the targeted ads showed them the thing they were searching for first. If that's the case, you can hardly call it a reduction in search quality -- it has the thing the user wanted at the top.
This statement is false.
Google search quality efforts are mostly "window dressing", as the U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island put it in his statement about Google's non-prosecution agreement. [mainjustice.com] When ad revenue conflicts with search quality, ad revenue wins. Prof. Ben Eidelman of the Harvard Business School [benedelman.org] has analyzed this in detail.
Do you even read your own links? Neither of those is talking about search quality whatsoever.
In this case the paper edition is cheaper comes with the more expensive on line version free. That seems pretty backwards/
It isn't particularly backwards when you realize that they make more from print advertisers to have one additional 'paid' print subscriber than it costs them to actually print and deliver one additional copy.
If you buy the online-only subscription you're costing them ad revenue.
You might notice that the truth of that statement does not dispute the argument that the number of subscribers is inflated by those who were not given the choice of declining the subscription in exchange for a price reduction on the iPad.
I'd agree with you if Apple were suing EVERYONE who makes black rectangles, but they're not.
But they wouldn't anyway. Samsung's aim is to make a product that feels familiar to Apple's customers. There is a significant difference between confusion and familiarity -- you can be quite aware that something is made by a different manufacturer and yet buy it because you know that when you intentionally switch, you don't have to learn an entirely new set of icons and interface conventions. That's not trademark infringement, it's competition.
Naturally Apple would like nothing more than to prevent that. But nobody wants to file a lawsuit against a dozen huge manufacturing giants, especially with a questionable case. Better to only go after the one most similar to yours and make an example of them, so that anybody else who dares to target a product at the aggressor's customer base will think twice.
The problem is it isn't at all clear that Apple has any right to do that. They're arguing consumer confusion. But nobody is going to the store and buying a Galaxy Tab thinking it's an iPad. Just making something similar is not illegal, it's the basis of the free market -- Apple has to have a valid and infringed monopoly right in order to prevent competition. And it isn't clear that they do.
Even Samsung seems to realize it - they've managed to change the Nexus Galaxy and I don't think they believe the function was compromised.
Well, certainly they've realized that someone with a right you claim is invalid can get a judge to order you to stop selling your product before you get a chance to show the court why it's invalid. Which is no doubt much to the delight of Apple -- but that doesn't make Apple right. It only makes them a successful bully.
Most of that Trillion ain't government backed . . . but student loan laws have been made lot tougher, even total bankruptcy doesn't erase the debt.
Which is an even worse action of the government. It's debt slavery. Even if the money isn't backed by the treasury, if it's backed by the courts with no opportunity to discharge the debt then one way or another either the bank gets their money or the borrower dies penniless.
Did you read the article?
What it did was make it so that a business had to prove a business need for a test that had the effect of discriminating against a minority group. And since African Americans are statistically poorer and attend worse schools, any test that measures intelligence or the quality of someone's primary education will tend to have that impact.
And since proving the business need for an intelligence test by going to court was both extremely expensive and fraught with uncertainty, employers abandoned testing to weed out new employees and started using degrees instead. (Which had the effect of discriminating even more against minorities, who tend to be less affluent and therefore less able to afford college.)
what good will it be to get the source?
See obvious answer here.
Having the source to the drivers would be preferable as then they could be improved as well, but nothing other than being a purist stops you from using the binary blobs as-is and improving the code that is open source.
To reiterate, these servers contain only the ‘gingerbread’ and ‘master’
branches from the old AOSP servers. We plan to release the source for the
recently-announced Ice Cream Sandwich soon, once it’s available on devices.
Let's think this through:
Apple sues Samsung. Samsung argues that Apple's patents are invalid. The judge says that the patents are presumed valid and orders Samsung to stop selling their product while it conducts a trial to determine whether they are in actuality invalid. Three years later when Samsung finally wins, they are finally allowed to sell the three-year-old product that nobody wants anymore.
Or, they can design a new product that doesn't infringe the allegedly invalid patents and then start selling it right away.
So what thing useful to Apple's lawyers do you imagine that Samsung admitted? That the legal system is so flawed that a vendor can be forced to redesign their products to avoid an invalid patent?