Illegal restraint of trade is generally something a company does on its own, not something a company gets a court to do.
This is not illegal restraint of trade, because a) it hasn't friggin' happened yet, it's only that RIAA has asked a court to order it, and b) even if it did happen, something ordered by a court is assumed to be legal unless it's overturned, and even if it is it's ultimately the court's fault, and not the petitioner.
If I ask a court to kill my neighbor, that in itself does not make me a murderer.
Next time your knee jerks, don't let it hit you in the head and cause brain damage.
Maybe I did. But I think you've missed mine as well.:)
By saying that, for instance, ultra-violent media does not influence certain kids to act out aggressively - you've wrapped up into a neat tidy little package what doesn't cause Columbines.
I did not mean to imply that violent TV or video games may not have been among the many causes of Columbine and similar school shootings. They may well have been.
I also did not mean to imply that, if you as a parent find the V-chip or filtering software an appropriate way to control what your children see, that you should not be allowed to use it. While I have serious qualms about the ability of the V-chip or filtering software to do what they claim, I acknowledge your right as a parent to use them if you wish.
What I do have a problem with is government requirements to install V-chips in all televisions or filtering software on all computers. To have the choice to buy a TV with a V-chip is a good thing, in my mind; to not have the choice to buy a TV without a V-chip is a bad thing.
My other problem is with people who suggest that, because some children may be badly influenced by violent video games or violent television, all children should be prohibited from seeing them. To make an analogy: most adults drink alcoholic beverages responsibly, but there is a minority who do not. In fact, thousands of Americans are killed every year by people who abuse alcohol. This is not just the possibility of potential damage--this is a well-known fact! Yet, when we tried banning alcoholic beverages because there were some adults who could not enjoy them responsibly, we found that the "cure" was far worse than the disease. I am not eager to repeat that experiment by banning violent television or video games.
I completely agree that it's a good thing to be exposed to viewpoints different than your own. I try, from time to time, to remember to read articles that I know I disagree with. I come away either realizing that the article's reasoning was flawed, and why, thus making my understanding of the opposing position better; or, sometimes, with the sneaking suspicion that maybe I was wrong after all and I should rethink my position. Either way, I like to think that I am a stronger person for it.
But I would never force someone to be exposed to viewpoints that they don't want to be exposed to. This is the central point of the article: it is good to be exposed to alternative viewpoints, but it is bad to be forced to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.
Unfortunately, I see no middle ground here, and I prefer to stick with the current system where people are not forced to be exposed to alternative viewpoints, as the lesser of two evils.
Some of us may remember when television stations were required to give "equal time" to opposing viewpoints. This was eventually struck down as unconstitutional. It amounts to forcing someone to speak in a way they do not wish to speak. Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak (as Katz acknowledges). I have no intention of giving up my freedom not to speak, even at the potential "cost" of people not being forced to be exposed, against their will, to alternative viewpoints.
But there's another, more insidious danger with "equal time" laws, either of the sort that used to exist in this country, or of the sort that Sunstein suggests. It misleads people into thinking that there are only two viewpoints on any issue. In fact, on important issues, there are likely to be three or five or ten different viewpoints.
How many of us are fed up with both Republicans and Democrats? Under equal time laws, Republican and Democratic views can be presented as opposing viewpoints, with all others suppressed. "Surely," you may ask, "having all but two viewpoints suppressed is better than having all but one viewpoint suppressed?" No, I don't agree. If only one viewpoint is presented, I believe most people will realize that it is not the only viewpoint. If only two are presented, I fear that more people will think they are getting the full picture.
In their debates last year, one of the few issues Bush and Gore disagreed on was whether to use some of the U.S. oil reserves. Meanwhile, libertarians were asking why we have government-owned oil reserves at all; but that viewpoint was not considered. It's bad enough when it happens in presidential debates, but it would be worse to have it happen across all news.
To take another example, a website under Sunstein's rules, might expose people to "both" sides of the abortion debate by presenting an article with the extreme pro-life position, and one with the extreme pro-choice position. Extremists on both sides of this issue claim that there can be no compromise--depsite the fact that the vast, but nonvocal majority of Americans seem to want a compromise, allowing abortion early in the pregnancy but not allowing partial-birth abortions. Is this really a good way to expose people to differing viewpoints?
I (and I would suspect, most other people) simply do not have the time to read every possible viewpoint on an issue. I do not read every comment in a/. article with 500+ comments, even though I know I might be missing some valuable comments. Given this practical limitation, there seem to me to be only two possibilities: give each person individual control over how to filter which comments he and she will read (and accept that some people will apply filters that I personally don't agree with), or have a "moderation czar" (no doubt Sunstein himself would be happy to volunteer for this) who decides which alternative viewpoints people should be exposed to. I'll stick with the former, thank you very much.
I have seen many people say that it's ridiculous or nonsense that "x" caused Columbine or "y" caused Columbine but those same people have never explained what, then, caused Columbine. When I refer to Columbine I am encompassing the entire school shooting phenomena.
No one single thing caused Columbine. Human motivation is a complex thing. Probably hundreds, if not thousands, of different experiences that Klebold and Harris had contributed to their actions, and no single one is solely responsible.
I understand people's desire to have things all wrapped up in a neat tidy package, and be able to simply say "X caused Columbine" and be done with it. However, wishing that a thing were true does not make it true, and there is no one single influence that can be blamed for Columbine, no matter how much we want there to be.
You almost had me. As I started to read your comment, I thought, gee, I'm not a parent, I don't know what it's like to raise children, so I should listen to someone who does know what it was like.
You almost had me. I didn't realize you were a troll, until:
I only need to point to a few infamous locations here in the US to dispute your argument....lets start with Columbine high school in Colorado.
I propose that for the 21st century, the "Nazis" in Godwin's law should be replaced by "Columbine." It seems that anytime anyone doesn't like something, it's become traditional to blame Columbine on that thing. "British beef caused the Columbine tragedy! Chinese spies caused the Columbine tragedy! American television caused the Columbine tragedy!"
Leave MINE alone you hypocritical free expression at all costs liberal!
Liberal? Now I know you're trolling. Liberals are just as happy to be censors as conservatives are.
I know of a PBS station which did this several years ago. Well, not exactly, but very close. A few weeks before their pledge drive was scheduled, they put on short solicitations, just in the normal break between shows. Essentially, they said, "Our pledge drive is scheduled for a few weeks from now. We know how much pledge drives annoy you, so if we get enough contributions before then to meet our goal, we'll cancel the pledge drive." The best part is, they did meet their goal and did cancel the pledge drive! I've since moved out of that area, so I don't know whether they're still doing that.
"Flamers, fanatics, spammers, and other e-vandals" are only a small part of the problem. Yes, they exist, and yes, they make it more difficult to communicate, but the "problem" (if it really is one) exists even without them.
Even if you read/. at -1, the majority of comments posted to an article are on topic. Yet, I browse most articles at 3, and set my threshold lower only for those articles I'm especially interested in. It's not that the posts at 2 and 1 and often even 0 don't have interesting things to say, it's just that I don't have time to read all those comments.
Katz's identification of the problem can be summed up in two sentences:
It would be wonderful if everyone listened to all the wonderful things everyone else had to say.
But people don't have time to do that.
And as we've come to expect from Katz, no suggested solution is proffered.
Why are people content to have their input filtered this way, Katz asks? Because most of us accept the reality that this volume of communication imposes upon us, and don't take it personally if other people choose not to read our comments.
"The Net is beginning to endanger a democratic socieety, Sunstein fears, with its fragmentation, advanced moderation and filtering systems."
Oh, please. Before the net, Jon, you and I had no way to communicate at all. Now you can talk, and if I choose to, I can listen to you; and if I choose to, I can ignore you. How is this less free than the situation before the net, when you and I had no effective means of communication at all, regardless of whether we wanted to communicate or not?
Freedom of speech includes more than its mere name would suggest: freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak, the freedom to listen, and the freedom not to listen. If people choose to exercise their freedom not to listen, that is democracy in action, and not a mortal threat to democracy, as Katz would have us believe.
Yeah but if you want to talk about bio innovations, when was the last time a cure was developed for any disease? That cure for cancer thats been promised since the 50's isn't here yet
Promised by whom?
Anyway, cancer is an umbrella term for hundreds of diseases which have some things in common, but are very different in other ways. To say "we haven't cured cancer" is like saying "we haven't cured infectious disease."
"Prior art" applies to patent law, not trademark law.
It's a common mistake among/.ers to assume that what applies to one type of intellectual property law applies to all. Nothing could be further from the truth.
More generally, scientists and engineers often make the mistake of thinking that you can look at specific laws and make generalizations from them to similar cases. This works fine in science and engineering. It's what science is all about, in fact. But it's not how law works.
There are no general principles in law, only the specifics of individual laws. Oh, sure, the motivations of lawmakers may cause different laws to seem to be based on the same principle, but you can't extrapolate from one law to another.
More directly relavant to IP law, patents != trademarks != copyrights != patents.
To take one simple example, trademarks cannot be selectively enforced. If you let some people get away with infringing your trademark (and I'm talking here about bona fide trademark infringements, and not the bogus type seen here in the Fox vs. UW case), you may find that you no longer have a trademark, against your will.
People often try to extrapolate, and thus reason that patents and copyrights also cannot be selectively enforced, but this is not so. Patents and copyrights can and are selectively enforced, and the fact that you did not enforce your patent or copyright against one infringer does not weaken it in the least.
Why should selective enforcement be allowed for patents and copyrights, but not for trademarks? No reason, as far as I can tell. There are no general principles at work here, only specific laws, which allow for selective enforcement of patents and copyrights, but not trademarks. QED.
Sorry to ramble on for so long, but it's a common mistake on/.
And how often do the lawyers on Ally McBeal and the Practice deal with patent cases? (I don't watch either so I don't know for sure, but I'd bet it's basically never.)
Prior art requires a published document. If you've been doing something since the Middle Ages, but you've never published it, it's not prior art. (There's an exception that allows *you* to keep doing whatever it is you were doing in this case, but the patent is still valid against everyone else.)
If you had a published document, all you would need to do is to produce the document--you wouldn't have to bother with witnesses or affadavits.
Still, as I understand it, you don't need to have prior art that's an exact implementation of a patent to break it.
Um, yes you do. Sort of.
To bust a particular claim in a patent (the little numbered bits), you have to identify prior art that does exactly what that claim describes.
Each claim stands or falls on its own. So if you find something that exactly matches what's described in claim #1, you can (in theory) have claim #1 invalidated, but the other claims may still stand.
This is important to understand: in a legal challenge, each claim will stand or fall on its own. It is very common in validity challenges for some of the claims in a patent to be overturned, while others are upheld.
The other area which sometimes causes confusion is the specification (the long part that comes before the numbered claims, also sometimes called the detailed description). This is supposed to describe exactly how the inventor implemented the invention, and is usually much more specific than the claims. (It has to be specific enough so that someone "skilled in the art" can re-create what the inventors have done.) To invalidate a patent's claims, your prior art does not have to exactly match the specification.
IANAL, but I do work with patent lawyers on a regular basis.
In patent law, "obvious" does not mean "obvious after someone has explained it to you." The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is obvious to anyone who's taken an undergraduate course in molecular biology, after it's been explained to them, but that didn't (nor should it) prevent a valid patent on PCR.
"I'm pretty damned smart. Anything I don't know, I can learn in relatively short prder."
Keep it up! You've almost achieved the level known as Slashdot Arrogance, but you're not quite there yet. Try telling yourself this: "I am knowledgeable in some fields; therefore I am knowledgeable in all fields. I know more about law than the best lawyers and more about medicine than the best doctors."
Napster users aren't taking someone else's music and then selling it back to them. Whereas the CDDB is taking the result of other people's labor -- a database rather than music tracks -- and selling it back to them.
So what? You knew when you submitted information to CDDB that they could have done this. If you didn't like that fact, you didn't have to submit information to CDDb.
Know what else? Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is in the public domain, yet publishers have the gall to sell for profit copies of the book! How dare they! It's available for free, so they're evil to sell it!!
One of them would have effectively outlawed transmission of any "indecent" material over the internet. Problem is that "indecent" was undefined, although it was clearly broader than "obscenity" which does not receive first amendment protection.
It was this part of the CDA which was struck down by the supreme court in Reno v. ACLU
The SC didn't strike down the entire CDA, which is a good thing, because another part of the CDA, which is at issue here, holds that ISPs are not responsible for materials transmitted via the ISP.
So part of the CDA is good and part of it is bad, which (as you note) is too much for the hivemind to comprehend.
When vinnythenose said "well, there used to be no fear of retribution" I assumed he was referring to Internet speech, since there has always been retribution for real world speech.
Oh, I see. I assumed he was referring to fear of retribution from corporations, since there has always been retribution from some group for speech.:)
Not on the Internet, not always. 15 years ago you could post pretty much ANY outlandish flamebait you wanted without fear.
Well, duh. 15 years ago 99% of the population didn't know the internet existed.
But anonymous speech is not some brand new thing that's just been around since the internet was here. If you can't see beyond the internet, you miss the fact that First Amendment protection that has been given to anonymous speech in the U.S. for hundreds of years. Any analysis of the right of people to speak anonymously which does not look beyond the internet is necessarily incomplete.
OK, let's make an analogy. I'm overcharged by a company for some product or service. I take them to court.
While the court proceedings are going on, I tell you about how the company screwed me over. You say, "the bastards! I'm going to steal from the evil company and keep the pilfered items for myself."
How does this help me?
If you want to attack record companies by violation of copyright--regardless of whether or not they're abusing copyright--I won't stop you. Just don't pretend that you're somehow helping the artists by this action.
If record companies are screwing over musicians, then it's up to musicians to lead the revolt.
It's kinda funny how people can't stand behind what they say by using their name. But anonymity is important, it allows more free opinions without fear of retribution. Well, there used to be no fear of retribution.
When was this? Sure, there was a time where there was no fear of retribution from corporations. But more generally, there has always been a fear of retribution from the powerful, whether they be corporations, governments, the church, the upper class, or just plain bullies.
If I try to be anonymous, does that mean I should legally be anonymous, even if they can find out who I was (via IP addresses, logs, etc)?
I'd say it depends on how hard you "try"--whether or not you have a reasonable expectation, as another poster noted. In general, though, I would say yes, you have a right to remain anonymous.
Some/.ers--probably a minority, but a significant minority--seem to believe that anything which is technologically possible should be legal. I don't agree. This amounts to a "tech-savvy makes right" attitude which in my mind is no better than "might makes right."
Who is in the wrong in a posting situation. If I break my contract and try to dissuade people from purchasing from my company (assuming my contract has a clause like that). I am still wrong for doing that, even if I am anonymous. But if they can find out who I am, I'm no longer anonymous.
This situation is not new to the internet. Journalists have long protected the anonymity of their sources if asked to do so, and that has generally been upheld in law. (Although judges are not in universal agreement on that point.)
Are they breaking my rights as an individual by finding out who I am?
It depends on how they found out about it. Using subpoenas in the manner of this and other cases is in violation of your rights. (I speak here of my ideal of your moral rights, not necessarily your legal rights.) They don't know who you are in advance, so they can't tell in advance whether you're divulging the information legally or illegally. And they only have the right to know who you are if you're doing it illegally.
A catch-22 for the company? Sure. I see it as one of the prices of free speech. But if they can identify you through legitimate means, they can still prosecute you.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't forget "It's to protect the children."
This is not illegal restraint of trade, because a) it hasn't friggin' happened yet, it's only that RIAA has asked a court to order it, and b) even if it did happen, something ordered by a court is assumed to be legal unless it's overturned, and even if it is it's ultimately the court's fault, and not the petitioner.
If I ask a court to kill my neighbor, that in itself does not make me a murderer.
Next time your knee jerks, don't let it hit you in the head and cause brain damage.
Maybe I did. But I think you've missed mine as well. :)
By saying that, for instance, ultra-violent media does not influence certain kids to act out aggressively - you've wrapped up into a neat tidy little package what doesn't cause Columbines.
I did not mean to imply that violent TV or video games may not have been among the many causes of Columbine and similar school shootings. They may well have been.
I also did not mean to imply that, if you as a parent find the V-chip or filtering software an appropriate way to control what your children see, that you should not be allowed to use it. While I have serious qualms about the ability of the V-chip or filtering software to do what they claim, I acknowledge your right as a parent to use them if you wish.
What I do have a problem with is government requirements to install V-chips in all televisions or filtering software on all computers. To have the choice to buy a TV with a V-chip is a good thing, in my mind; to not have the choice to buy a TV without a V-chip is a bad thing.
My other problem is with people who suggest that, because some children may be badly influenced by violent video games or violent television, all children should be prohibited from seeing them. To make an analogy: most adults drink alcoholic beverages responsibly, but there is a minority who do not. In fact, thousands of Americans are killed every year by people who abuse alcohol. This is not just the possibility of potential damage--this is a well-known fact! Yet, when we tried banning alcoholic beverages because there were some adults who could not enjoy them responsibly, we found that the "cure" was far worse than the disease. I am not eager to repeat that experiment by banning violent television or video games.
But I would never force someone to be exposed to viewpoints that they don't want to be exposed to. This is the central point of the article: it is good to be exposed to alternative viewpoints, but it is bad to be forced to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.
Unfortunately, I see no middle ground here, and I prefer to stick with the current system where people are not forced to be exposed to alternative viewpoints, as the lesser of two evils.
Some of us may remember when television stations were required to give "equal time" to opposing viewpoints. This was eventually struck down as unconstitutional. It amounts to forcing someone to speak in a way they do not wish to speak. Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak (as Katz acknowledges). I have no intention of giving up my freedom not to speak, even at the potential "cost" of people not being forced to be exposed, against their will, to alternative viewpoints.
But there's another, more insidious danger with "equal time" laws, either of the sort that used to exist in this country, or of the sort that Sunstein suggests. It misleads people into thinking that there are only two viewpoints on any issue. In fact, on important issues, there are likely to be three or five or ten different viewpoints.
How many of us are fed up with both Republicans and Democrats? Under equal time laws, Republican and Democratic views can be presented as opposing viewpoints, with all others suppressed. "Surely," you may ask, "having all but two viewpoints suppressed is better than having all but one viewpoint suppressed?" No, I don't agree. If only one viewpoint is presented, I believe most people will realize that it is not the only viewpoint. If only two are presented, I fear that more people will think they are getting the full picture.
In their debates last year, one of the few issues Bush and Gore disagreed on was whether to use some of the U.S. oil reserves. Meanwhile, libertarians were asking why we have government-owned oil reserves at all; but that viewpoint was not considered. It's bad enough when it happens in presidential debates, but it would be worse to have it happen across all news.
To take another example, a website under Sunstein's rules, might expose people to "both" sides of the abortion debate by presenting an article with the extreme pro-life position, and one with the extreme pro-choice position. Extremists on both sides of this issue claim that there can be no compromise--depsite the fact that the vast, but nonvocal majority of Americans seem to want a compromise, allowing abortion early in the pregnancy but not allowing partial-birth abortions. Is this really a good way to expose people to differing viewpoints?
I (and I would suspect, most other people) simply do not have the time to read every possible viewpoint on an issue. I do not read every comment in a /. article with 500+ comments, even though I know I might be missing some valuable comments. Given this practical limitation, there seem to me to be only two possibilities: give each person individual control over how to filter which comments he and she will read (and accept that some people will apply filters that I personally don't agree with), or have a "moderation czar" (no doubt Sunstein himself would be happy to volunteer for this) who decides which alternative viewpoints people should be exposed to. I'll stick with the former, thank you very much.
No one single thing caused Columbine. Human motivation is a complex thing. Probably hundreds, if not thousands, of different experiences that Klebold and Harris had contributed to their actions, and no single one is solely responsible.
I understand people's desire to have things all wrapped up in a neat tidy package, and be able to simply say "X caused Columbine" and be done with it. However, wishing that a thing were true does not make it true, and there is no one single influence that can be blamed for Columbine, no matter how much we want there to be.
You almost had me. I didn't realize you were a troll, until:
I only need to point to a few infamous locations here in the US to dispute your argument....lets start with Columbine high school in Colorado.
I propose that for the 21st century, the "Nazis" in Godwin's law should be replaced by "Columbine." It seems that anytime anyone doesn't like something, it's become traditional to blame Columbine on that thing. "British beef caused the Columbine tragedy! Chinese spies caused the Columbine tragedy! American television caused the Columbine tragedy!"
Leave MINE alone you hypocritical free expression at all costs liberal!
Liberal? Now I know you're trolling. Liberals are just as happy to be censors as conservatives are.
I know of a PBS station which did this several years ago. Well, not exactly, but very close. A few weeks before their pledge drive was scheduled, they put on short solicitations, just in the normal break between shows. Essentially, they said, "Our pledge drive is scheduled for a few weeks from now. We know how much pledge drives annoy you, so if we get enough contributions before then to meet our goal, we'll cancel the pledge drive." The best part is, they did meet their goal and did cancel the pledge drive! I've since moved out of that area, so I don't know whether they're still doing that.
Even if you read /. at -1, the majority of comments posted to an article are on topic. Yet, I browse most articles at 3, and set my threshold lower only for those articles I'm especially interested in. It's not that the posts at 2 and 1 and often even 0 don't have interesting things to say, it's just that I don't have time to read all those comments.
Katz's identification of the problem can be summed up in two sentences:
And as we've come to expect from Katz, no suggested solution is proffered.
Why are people content to have their input filtered this way, Katz asks? Because most of us accept the reality that this volume of communication imposes upon us, and don't take it personally if other people choose not to read our comments.
"The Net is beginning to endanger a democratic socieety, Sunstein fears, with its fragmentation, advanced moderation and filtering systems."
Oh, please. Before the net, Jon, you and I had no way to communicate at all. Now you can talk, and if I choose to, I can listen to you; and if I choose to, I can ignore you. How is this less free than the situation before the net, when you and I had no effective means of communication at all, regardless of whether we wanted to communicate or not?
Freedom of speech includes more than its mere name would suggest: freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak, the freedom to listen, and the freedom not to listen. If people choose to exercise their freedom not to listen, that is democracy in action, and not a mortal threat to democracy, as Katz would have us believe.
Promised by whom?
Anyway, cancer is an umbrella term for hundreds of diseases which have some things in common, but are very different in other ways. To say "we haven't cured cancer" is like saying "we haven't cured infectious disease."
It's a common mistake among /.ers to assume that what applies to one type of intellectual property law applies to all. Nothing could be further from the truth.
More generally, scientists and engineers often make the mistake of thinking that you can look at specific laws and make generalizations from them to similar cases. This works fine in science and engineering. It's what science is all about, in fact. But it's not how law works.
There are no general principles in law, only the specifics of individual laws. Oh, sure, the motivations of lawmakers may cause different laws to seem to be based on the same principle, but you can't extrapolate from one law to another.
More directly relavant to IP law, patents != trademarks != copyrights != patents.
To take one simple example, trademarks cannot be selectively enforced. If you let some people get away with infringing your trademark (and I'm talking here about bona fide trademark infringements, and not the bogus type seen here in the Fox vs. UW case), you may find that you no longer have a trademark, against your will.
People often try to extrapolate, and thus reason that patents and copyrights also cannot be selectively enforced, but this is not so. Patents and copyrights can and are selectively enforced, and the fact that you did not enforce your patent or copyright against one infringer does not weaken it in the least.
Why should selective enforcement be allowed for patents and copyrights, but not for trademarks? No reason, as far as I can tell. There are no general principles at work here, only specific laws, which allow for selective enforcement of patents and copyrights, but not trademarks. QED.
Sorry to ramble on for so long, but it's a common mistake on /.
Prior art requires a published document. If you've been doing something since the Middle Ages, but you've never published it, it's not prior art. (There's an exception that allows *you* to keep doing whatever it is you were doing in this case, but the patent is still valid against everyone else.)
If you had a published document, all you would need to do is to produce the document--you wouldn't have to bother with witnesses or affadavits.
Um, yes you do. Sort of.
To bust a particular claim in a patent (the little numbered bits), you have to identify prior art that does exactly what that claim describes.
Each claim stands or falls on its own. So if you find something that exactly matches what's described in claim #1, you can (in theory) have claim #1 invalidated, but the other claims may still stand.
This is important to understand: in a legal challenge, each claim will stand or fall on its own. It is very common in validity challenges for some of the claims in a patent to be overturned, while others are upheld.
The other area which sometimes causes confusion is the specification (the long part that comes before the numbered claims, also sometimes called the detailed description). This is supposed to describe exactly how the inventor implemented the invention, and is usually much more specific than the claims. (It has to be specific enough so that someone "skilled in the art" can re-create what the inventors have done.) To invalidate a patent's claims, your prior art does not have to exactly match the specification.
IANAL, but I do work with patent lawyers on a regular basis.
In patent law, "obvious" does not mean "obvious after someone has explained it to you." The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is obvious to anyone who's taken an undergraduate course in molecular biology, after it's been explained to them, but that didn't (nor should it) prevent a valid patent on PCR.
Keep it up! You've almost achieved the level known as Slashdot Arrogance, but you're not quite there yet. Try telling yourself this: "I am knowledgeable in some fields; therefore I am knowledgeable in all fields. I know more about law than the best lawyers and more about medicine than the best doctors."
So what? You knew when you submitted information to CDDB that they could have done this. If you didn't like that fact, you didn't have to submit information to CDDb.
Know what else? Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is in the public domain, yet publishers have the gall to sell for profit copies of the book! How dare they! It's available for free, so they're evil to sell it!!
Not a problem, in theory. What happens when someone actually tries that?
Again, long URL, here in plaintext (remove any spaces):
http://www.lisnews.com/article.php3?sid=2001030513 0545
And here's the URL in plaintext since /. has a way of mangling long URLs (any spaces which appear here should not be there):
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/zorn /0,1122,SAV-9908260240,00.html
One of them would have effectively outlawed transmission of any "indecent" material over the internet. Problem is that "indecent" was undefined, although it was clearly broader than "obscenity" which does not receive first amendment protection.
It was this part of the CDA which was struck down by the supreme court in Reno v. ACLU
The SC didn't strike down the entire CDA, which is a good thing, because another part of the CDA, which is at issue here, holds that ISPs are not responsible for materials transmitted via the ISP.
So part of the CDA is good and part of it is bad, which (as you note) is too much for the hivemind to comprehend.
Oh, I see. I assumed he was referring to fear of retribution from corporations, since there has always been retribution from some group for speech. :)
Well, duh. 15 years ago 99% of the population didn't know the internet existed.
But anonymous speech is not some brand new thing that's just been around since the internet was here. If you can't see beyond the internet, you miss the fact that First Amendment protection that has been given to anonymous speech in the U.S. for hundreds of years. Any analysis of the right of people to speak anonymously which does not look beyond the internet is necessarily incomplete.
While the court proceedings are going on, I tell you about how the company screwed me over. You say, "the bastards! I'm going to steal from the evil company and keep the pilfered items for myself."
How does this help me?
If you want to attack record companies by violation of copyright--regardless of whether or not they're abusing copyright--I won't stop you. Just don't pretend that you're somehow helping the artists by this action.
If record companies are screwing over musicians, then it's up to musicians to lead the revolt.
And how is this rectified by listeners ripping off the artists and record companies alike?
When was this? Sure, there was a time where there was no fear of retribution from corporations. But more generally, there has always been a fear of retribution from the powerful, whether they be corporations, governments, the church, the upper class, or just plain bullies.
If I try to be anonymous, does that mean I should legally be anonymous, even if they can find out who I was (via IP addresses, logs, etc)?
I'd say it depends on how hard you "try"--whether or not you have a reasonable expectation, as another poster noted. In general, though, I would say yes, you have a right to remain anonymous.
Some /.ers--probably a minority, but a significant minority--seem to believe that anything which is technologically possible should be legal. I don't agree. This amounts to a "tech-savvy makes right" attitude which in my mind is no better than "might makes right."
Who is in the wrong in a posting situation. If I break my contract and try to dissuade people from purchasing from my company (assuming my contract has a clause like that). I am still wrong for doing that, even if I am anonymous. But if they can find out who I am, I'm no longer anonymous.
This situation is not new to the internet. Journalists have long protected the anonymity of their sources if asked to do so, and that has generally been upheld in law. (Although judges are not in universal agreement on that point.)
Are they breaking my rights as an individual by finding out who I am?
It depends on how they found out about it. Using subpoenas in the manner of this and other cases is in violation of your rights. (I speak here of my ideal of your moral rights, not necessarily your legal rights.) They don't know who you are in advance, so they can't tell in advance whether you're divulging the information legally or illegally. And they only have the right to know who you are if you're doing it illegally.
A catch-22 for the company? Sure. I see it as one of the prices of free speech. But if they can identify you through legitimate means, they can still prosecute you.
When has not reading the linked story ever stopped /.ers from discussing it?
In case you haven't noticed, it's no longer 1992.