Here in NY we don't do that. No, instead we just say that ~60% of our kids are failing due to new high stakes tests that Pearson creates and nobody else gets to review. Then we give teachers scripts (EngageNY) to tell them what to teach, when, and how. Because every student learns in the exact same way. Finally, we give Pearson a ton of money to develop test after test to show that our kids are still failing so we need to blame the teachers more and give more money to corporations to run our schools. Then the politicians and administrators grant themselves raises (at least one as high as 10%!) and pat themselves on the back over a job well done.
Don't worry, we seem to be on it. We now have "Common Core" math which is so insanely difficult and confusing that kids will hate math and will never want to do it in their lives. Don't believe me? Try this Common Core math problem: "What is 32 - 12?" Now wait just a second... I'm guessing you're trying to subtract 12 from 32. That's the wrong way to do it according to Common Core. No, instead you need to do this:
Now you draw a box around the 3, 5, 10, and 2 that you added in and then add those numbers up. 3 + 5 = 8 + 10 = 18 + 2 = 20. So the answer is 20. If a child just does:
32 -12 ----
20
They will be marked as wrong because they got the right answer, but in the wrong way.
The sad part? This isn't even as insane as it gets. My son was given the problem: 1.62 / 0.27. Instead of actually dividing, he was told to draw 162 "tenths segments" Then he had to redraw them, but in groupings of 27. The number of groupings was his answer. Does this work? Yes, but it doesn't teach kids to work with numbers. What if the number he needed to divide was 1.625? Would he need to draw 1,625 segments? What if the number was 492.572? Would he need to draw nearly half a million segments? The method doesn't scale at all and yet kids are being taught that THIS is how you solve math problems and doing it any other way is WRONG (even if it works and gives you the right answer).
I do miss the days of being able to say "X is broken, let's call the landlord and get it fixed." However, I don't miss the days of my rent going up constantly and being blamed on us wanting things fixed ("we fixed your air conditioner therefore we needed to raise your rent"). I also don't miss the days of having to deal with the people my landlord would hire to fix everything. (I had an air conditioner repairman try to tell me that no central AC system would ever cool a room below 75. I grew up in a house with central AC and we could cool the house to 60 if we wanted.)
The meaning of the statement is that the more power someone has, the harder it can be to resist the urge to abuse that power. Suppose you could throw anyone you didn't like into jail without fear of reprisal. You don't like what someone says and they're in jail indefinitely. No chance of them suing you for false imprisonment at all. At the start, you might only your power for really bad people in cases with a lot of proof. "That murderer killed fifteen kids, everyone saw him do it, and there's a video showing it." As time wore on, you might start requiring less and less proof. Eventually, you'd realize that you could get something you wanted by threatening to jail the person unless they gave it to you. You might not give in to the temptation this time or the next time, but how many times could you resist before you gave in?
Politicians have a lot of power every day of their terms. They might not abuse it today or tomorrow, but it's almost inevitable that many of them will give in at some point. It gets even worse when they can rationalize that their abuse of power is in the best interests of the people they are supposed to serve. Going back to the "jailing" example, this would be akin to you jailing someone convicted of a crime pre-trial because "everyone knows they are guilty" and you are "saving the tax payers money." You've rationalized that you're doing a good thing and might not even notice that you've abused your power.
The more power you give someone, the harder it can be to resist the temptation to abuse it or even to recognize when abuse happens. Give someone absolute power and they will be "absolutely corrupted" even if they think they are still acting as a good guy. This is why were are supposed to have checks and balances on our government. It's not perfect, but it's intended to keep each branch of the government in line and away from abuses.
Good point. So saying "I rip DVDs I buy" won't get me in trouble. Saying "I rip DVDs I buy using SomeRipper" might get me in trouble. If I include the URL for "SomeRipper", that could be even worse. And if I happen to develop/distribute "SomeRipper", then I'm in big trouble.
The standard should be "does this tool let people use it for legal actions"? If so, the tool itself should be legal even if some people use it for illegal actions. If we went by the DMCA's logic, then all computers should be banned because some people use computers to harass people. Therefore all computers are tools of harassment and must be banned.
srsly, some tvs have a video camera for skype? talk about a telescreen. you never know when they're watching, so you have to assume they're watching all the time.
Yeah mine has a camera and mic. But I have duct tape, so that's all right.
But the "anticircumvention law" is anticompetitive and against pretty much all legal precedent prior to DMCA. I am pretty sure that one won't last, either.
The DMCA was enacted in 1998. It's been in effect for over 15 years already. Unfortunately, I think it will last.
That being said, I agree that the anticircumvention language of the DMCA should be removed entirely. It's one thing to say "ripping a DVD and sharing it with fifteen people is against copyright law." It's another thing to say "ripping a DVD is against copyright law because if you do so you MIGHT share it with fifteen people." I could rip that DVD and keep the rip for my own personal use and it wouldn't run afoul of copyright law (except for the anticircumvention stuff).
We can't really afford to move. It would mean having to do a ton of repairs to our house right away instead of spaced out to get the house ready for selling, getting a new house (which could be a pain with locked credit due to identity theft), hoping the old one sells so we don't wind up paying 2 mortgages, moving all our stuff between the houses, uprooting our kids from their current schools, etc. This is too much to do simply because FIOS is available one town over.
Not when the phone company hasn't built their fiber network into your area. In the city I live in, Time Warner Cable is the only choice I have. Verizon stopped building FIOS at the edge of the city and has no plans on expanding it. So beyond TWC, I could choose wireless (extremely expensive for main home use), DSL (which the phone companies want to ditch ASAP), dial-up (way too slow for my needs), or satellite (slow AND expensive). In other words, no real options beyond TWC. This means that Time Warner Cable can provide me with the level of service *they* decide to give me and the price *they* decide to give me and I have no option but to take it.
I have a DVD ripper that produces MKV files. I then run these through a program to produce MP4 files to store on a hard drive and play through my Roku player. It's a long process (the rip usually takes about 45 minutes, the MKV->MP4 conversion takes hours) but worth it for the ease of use. And before anyone asks, I don't share out my rips, I don't rip discs I don't own, and I don't keep rips if I get rid of the original DVD disc. Also, being able to rip DVDs has increased my DVD purchasing since I can now watch the DVD content much easier.
The reason I hate the cable providers more than the music/movie industries is that it is harder to boycott the cable providers. You can cut the cord and get rid of cable TV, but if you want Internet access, you might only have access through your local cable company. (Like I do.) So you are locked into paying whatever your cable provider says you will pay for whatever Internet access speed they decide to give you. Don't like it? Go without Internet (or go back to dial up if you still have a landline or use the much more expensive wireless). There are indie options for music and movies. There isn't an "indie Internet access."
I don't mind aliens as long as they don't have stupid (possibly racist) accents and act in idiotic manners. They don't have to all be gung-ho soldiers and there can be humorous parts, but not "hey, I stepped in animal dung" humor.
I think one of the things that made Chewbacca work was that he spoke in "Wookie-language" instead of in some weird dialect of English. If you got rid of the worst of the "Jar-Jar antics" and replaced his dialogue with some "Gungan-language" (which wouldn't resemble English at all but that could be subtitled to English if need be), Jar Jar might have actually been a passable character. That might make for an interesting experiment. Take some scenes from Episode 1 and replace all Jar-Jar dialogue with a made up alien language. See if it improves the scene at all.
So Mars doesn't have big animals roaming the landscape or vast forests of plants. It doesn't have rivers, lakes, and oceans filled with marine animals. It doesn't even have moss growing across the surface. This doesn't mean that Mars is devoid of life. Perhaps the surface of Mars is completely inhospitable and so the life moved underground. We've dug into deep rocks on Earth and found bacteria that exist deep in the rocks which don't even need oxygen to survive. There could be a Martian equivalent to this deep under the Martian surface. Our rovers might not have dug deep enough to reach these.
Just because we haven't *found* any life doesn't mean there *isn't* any life.
That's because everything is forgiven if you shout TERRORISM loud enough.
Also, most politicians won't even consider going against the TSA on this because they are too afraid of being called "soft on terrorism" during their next election campaign. Fear isn't just for keeping the populace in line - it keeps the politicians in line also.
What balance? If some content is 100% legal. how is pointing to that content illegal? This would be like arresting people who give directions to restaurants even if the restaurants themselves aren't doing anything illegal. You *might* have an outside chance of convincing me that saying "there's that illegal thing over there" can be against the law (albeit a lesser offense than actually doing the illegal thing you are pointing to), but how can you make pointing to legal content hosted elsewhere illegal?
"In agreeing to these terms, you also agree to all future modifications of this TOS/license/EULA/etc." Many have language like this to let service providers and the like change their contract and auto-enroll people in the new language. I'm not sure how much legal muscle there is there, but a court doesn't even need to get to the point of a ruling. If a big enough company wanted to, they could tie someone up in court for years and then settle out of court. Their target would be bankrupt (or nearly so) and the point would have been made: Mess with Big Company and get your life destroyed.
First of all, how do you power the servers on the hubs? Where is the electricity coming from?
Secondly, where is the data connection to the hub coming from?
Lastly, who is administering the servers? Is it someone living in the US, UK, etc who remotes in? Or someone who lives on the "hub island"? If the latter, how do you get food and other essentials to the hub?
Now assume that some websites this hub is hosting makes the US and some other big countries angry. I'll even grant some leeway and assume that raiding the island and seizing the computers would be troublesome. No problem. Simply cut off the electrical feed, sever the data connection, arrest any off-hub personnel, and/or block any supply shipments for on-hub personnel. You've just brought the hub to its knees.
If an "international consortium" is managing the hub, who is on the consortium? What countries are they from? Would they be vulnerable to "attack" via friends/family members/interests based in those or other countries?
When the recording industry went after sites that pointed to (but didn't themselves host) pirated material, we shook our heads in amazement. How could pointing to something be illegal? Wouldn't the thing itself be illegal but saying "illegal thing is over here" just be informative?
Now the EU is actually going one worse. Apparently, having the article online is fine. No problem. Perfectly legal. However, a search engine saying "there's that legal thing over there" is illegal - in some vague circumstances.
Your house is not a public location. Since you control who can enter and exit, telling people to leave because they decided to turn your living room into a protest zone is perfectly fine. However, telling people that they can't march on the public sidewalk (not privately owned) with signs would be preventing their free speech. Similarly, I could try protesting in a mall, but they would be well within their rights to kick me out and ban me from re-entering. They couldn't prevent me from protesting on public property in front of the mall, but they could ban me from entering the mall itself.
Also, freedom to speak doesn't mean freedom to be heard. If a protester is handing out pamphlets and you refuse one, you haven't violated his freedom of speech. You're just refusing to listen to his speech (read the pamphlet). Now, if the government came by and told him not to hand out the pamphlets, they might be infringing on his freedom of speech.
It's even worse than that. The article gives the example of a company, KlearGear, trying to charge a couple because they left a negative review of the company. The wrinkle in this case: The negative review was posted three years before the lawsuit and before the "you can't criticize us online" text entered into the EULA. So the companies don't just want you to agree to whatever is in their EULA, they think you accepting the EULA means you also accept any future version of the EULA no matter what restrictions get added on.
In the case of the couple, the charge was sent to a collections agency which hurt the couple's credit rating. They, in turn, sued KlearGear to have the debt declared null and void. When KlearGear didn't show up to challenge the suit, the judge ruled in favor of the couple. What would have happened had KlearGear had a better legal team, though? Even if they didn't win, they could have easily tied the couple up in court for months or years, forcing them to bankruptcy with legal fees, until the company settled out of court with the couple. (Perhaps dropping the original fee in exchange for no precedent being set against the company and maybe even some token amount that wouldn't even cover the couples' legal costs.)
I agree that agreements can over-ride constitutional rights in some cases. For example, if I sign an NDA, I'm restricting my freedom of speech in a certain regard. However, these agreements should only be done on when something needs to be kept under wraps (details of a new product shown to reviewers early, for example), not as a matter-of-normal-business instituted when anyone has even the slightest business association with the company.
Because of the - rather idiotic if you ask me - distinction between the DVD content and the encryption "protecting" the DVD content.
I go into a store and buy a DVD. I then rip that DVD and store it on a hard drive for only my and my immediate, living-in-my-household family's use. Storing it on a hard drive wasn't the crime. It was breaking the encryption on the DVD disc that was illegal.
Actually, it might not even be me ripping the DVD that's illegal. Depending on local laws, this might be perfectly fine. However, making and offering a tool that breaks the DVD decryption would be considered an illegal act. In other words, doing X might be legal, but giving someone a tool that does X isn't.
Of course, about the only reason that ripping your own, legally purchased, DVDs and keeping them on your own systems (i.e. not sharing them out) might NOT be considered illegal is because it is an extremely hard action to catch. People who do this aren't leaving easily followed online tracks like people who share out rips do. While some might mention online that they do this, tracking down each person would take a ton of legal effort. The MPAA prefers the "low effort" route of suing people who share out rips and making the DVD ripping tools illegal.
I'd rather deal with a higher level of threat then accept extra legal NSA/CIA spying within the US.
That's because you realize that, if the NSA were to scrap their entire Internet spying program tomorrow, our percent chance of being directly affected by a terrorist attack would go up about 0.0000001% (and even that is probably overestimating it).
Don't forget that every mention of the word "bomb" being a possible threat. Even if used as to describe a bad movie ("The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie's gonna bomb at the box office") or as slang to describe something very good ("That burrito is da bomb."). It doesn't matter the context, it's a threat.
The fact that we haven't been attacked by mutant turtles wielding exploding burritos is thanks to the tireless work of the NSA!
Yes, the DMCA was good in that it exempted the site owners from being liable for user-generated content. Where is went wrong (in this specific area), though, was that there were effectively no penalties for false DMCA requests. If I don't like something online, I can file a DMCA request and threaten legal action if it isn't taken down. If I have enough legal muscle, I can essentially get whatever I want taken offline.
This "right to be forgotten" is doing the same thing. What if I tells Google to take down all links to an article because I want it forgotten? If it is a frivolous request (for example, if I'm trying to get Google to "forget" about a competitor of mine to improve my search rank), what legal penalties will I suffer? If there are none, then this is going to be abused like the DMCA is.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in NY we don't do that. No, instead we just say that ~60% of our kids are failing due to new high stakes tests that Pearson creates and nobody else gets to review. Then we give teachers scripts (EngageNY) to tell them what to teach, when, and how. Because every student learns in the exact same way. Finally, we give Pearson a ton of money to develop test after test to show that our kids are still failing so we need to blame the teachers more and give more money to corporations to run our schools. Then the politicians and administrators grant themselves raises (at least one as high as 10%!) and pat themselves on the back over a job well done.
Don't worry, we seem to be on it. We now have "Common Core" math which is so insanely difficult and confusing that kids will hate math and will never want to do it in their lives. Don't believe me? Try this Common Core math problem: "What is 32 - 12?" Now wait just a second... I'm guessing you're trying to subtract 12 from 32. That's the wrong way to do it according to Common Core. No, instead you need to do this:
32 - 12 = ?
12 + 3 = 15
15 + 5 = 20
20 + 10 = 30
30 + 2 = 32
Now you draw a box around the 3, 5, 10, and 2 that you added in and then add those numbers up. 3 + 5 = 8 + 10 = 18 + 2 = 20. So the answer is 20. If a child just does:
32
-12
----
20
They will be marked as wrong because they got the right answer, but in the wrong way.
The sad part? This isn't even as insane as it gets. My son was given the problem: 1.62 / 0.27. Instead of actually dividing, he was told to draw 162 "tenths segments" Then he had to redraw them, but in groupings of 27. The number of groupings was his answer. Does this work? Yes, but it doesn't teach kids to work with numbers. What if the number he needed to divide was 1.625? Would he need to draw 1,625 segments? What if the number was 492.572? Would he need to draw nearly half a million segments? The method doesn't scale at all and yet kids are being taught that THIS is how you solve math problems and doing it any other way is WRONG (even if it works and gives you the right answer).
I do miss the days of being able to say "X is broken, let's call the landlord and get it fixed." However, I don't miss the days of my rent going up constantly and being blamed on us wanting things fixed ("we fixed your air conditioner therefore we needed to raise your rent"). I also don't miss the days of having to deal with the people my landlord would hire to fix everything. (I had an air conditioner repairman try to tell me that no central AC system would ever cool a room below 75. I grew up in a house with central AC and we could cool the house to 60 if we wanted.)
The meaning of the statement is that the more power someone has, the harder it can be to resist the urge to abuse that power. Suppose you could throw anyone you didn't like into jail without fear of reprisal. You don't like what someone says and they're in jail indefinitely. No chance of them suing you for false imprisonment at all. At the start, you might only your power for really bad people in cases with a lot of proof. "That murderer killed fifteen kids, everyone saw him do it, and there's a video showing it." As time wore on, you might start requiring less and less proof. Eventually, you'd realize that you could get something you wanted by threatening to jail the person unless they gave it to you. You might not give in to the temptation this time or the next time, but how many times could you resist before you gave in?
Politicians have a lot of power every day of their terms. They might not abuse it today or tomorrow, but it's almost inevitable that many of them will give in at some point. It gets even worse when they can rationalize that their abuse of power is in the best interests of the people they are supposed to serve. Going back to the "jailing" example, this would be akin to you jailing someone convicted of a crime pre-trial because "everyone knows they are guilty" and you are "saving the tax payers money." You've rationalized that you're doing a good thing and might not even notice that you've abused your power.
The more power you give someone, the harder it can be to resist the temptation to abuse it or even to recognize when abuse happens. Give someone absolute power and they will be "absolutely corrupted" even if they think they are still acting as a good guy. This is why were are supposed to have checks and balances on our government. It's not perfect, but it's intended to keep each branch of the government in line and away from abuses.
Good point. So saying "I rip DVDs I buy" won't get me in trouble. Saying "I rip DVDs I buy using SomeRipper" might get me in trouble. If I include the URL for "SomeRipper", that could be even worse. And if I happen to develop/distribute "SomeRipper", then I'm in big trouble.
The standard should be "does this tool let people use it for legal actions"? If so, the tool itself should be legal even if some people use it for illegal actions. If we went by the DMCA's logic, then all computers should be banned because some people use computers to harass people. Therefore all computers are tools of harassment and must be banned.
NSA.gov
The DMCA was enacted in 1998. It's been in effect for over 15 years already. Unfortunately, I think it will last.
That being said, I agree that the anticircumvention language of the DMCA should be removed entirely. It's one thing to say "ripping a DVD and sharing it with fifteen people is against copyright law." It's another thing to say "ripping a DVD is against copyright law because if you do so you MIGHT share it with fifteen people." I could rip that DVD and keep the rip for my own personal use and it wouldn't run afoul of copyright law (except for the anticircumvention stuff).
We can't really afford to move. It would mean having to do a ton of repairs to our house right away instead of spaced out to get the house ready for selling, getting a new house (which could be a pain with locked credit due to identity theft), hoping the old one sells so we don't wind up paying 2 mortgages, moving all our stuff between the houses, uprooting our kids from their current schools, etc. This is too much to do simply because FIOS is available one town over.
Not when the phone company hasn't built their fiber network into your area. In the city I live in, Time Warner Cable is the only choice I have. Verizon stopped building FIOS at the edge of the city and has no plans on expanding it. So beyond TWC, I could choose wireless (extremely expensive for main home use), DSL (which the phone companies want to ditch ASAP), dial-up (way too slow for my needs), or satellite (slow AND expensive). In other words, no real options beyond TWC. This means that Time Warner Cable can provide me with the level of service *they* decide to give me and the price *they* decide to give me and I have no option but to take it.
I have a DVD ripper that produces MKV files. I then run these through a program to produce MP4 files to store on a hard drive and play through my Roku player. It's a long process (the rip usually takes about 45 minutes, the MKV->MP4 conversion takes hours) but worth it for the ease of use. And before anyone asks, I don't share out my rips, I don't rip discs I don't own, and I don't keep rips if I get rid of the original DVD disc. Also, being able to rip DVDs has increased my DVD purchasing since I can now watch the DVD content much easier.
The reason I hate the cable providers more than the music/movie industries is that it is harder to boycott the cable providers. You can cut the cord and get rid of cable TV, but if you want Internet access, you might only have access through your local cable company. (Like I do.) So you are locked into paying whatever your cable provider says you will pay for whatever Internet access speed they decide to give you. Don't like it? Go without Internet (or go back to dial up if you still have a landline or use the much more expensive wireless). There are indie options for music and movies. There isn't an "indie Internet access."
I don't mind aliens as long as they don't have stupid (possibly racist) accents and act in idiotic manners. They don't have to all be gung-ho soldiers and there can be humorous parts, but not "hey, I stepped in animal dung" humor.
I think one of the things that made Chewbacca work was that he spoke in "Wookie-language" instead of in some weird dialect of English. If you got rid of the worst of the "Jar-Jar antics" and replaced his dialogue with some "Gungan-language" (which wouldn't resemble English at all but that could be subtitled to English if need be), Jar Jar might have actually been a passable character. That might make for an interesting experiment. Take some scenes from Episode 1 and replace all Jar-Jar dialogue with a made up alien language. See if it improves the scene at all.
And, when you have thousands upon thousands of slaves working for you, man-hours dedicated to a project isn't a problem.
So Mars doesn't have big animals roaming the landscape or vast forests of plants. It doesn't have rivers, lakes, and oceans filled with marine animals. It doesn't even have moss growing across the surface. This doesn't mean that Mars is devoid of life. Perhaps the surface of Mars is completely inhospitable and so the life moved underground. We've dug into deep rocks on Earth and found bacteria that exist deep in the rocks which don't even need oxygen to survive. There could be a Martian equivalent to this deep under the Martian surface. Our rovers might not have dug deep enough to reach these.
Just because we haven't *found* any life doesn't mean there *isn't* any life.
That's because everything is forgiven if you shout TERRORISM loud enough.
Also, most politicians won't even consider going against the TSA on this because they are too afraid of being called "soft on terrorism" during their next election campaign. Fear isn't just for keeping the populace in line - it keeps the politicians in line also.
What balance? If some content is 100% legal. how is pointing to that content illegal? This would be like arresting people who give directions to restaurants even if the restaurants themselves aren't doing anything illegal. You *might* have an outside chance of convincing me that saying "there's that illegal thing over there" can be against the law (albeit a lesser offense than actually doing the illegal thing you are pointing to), but how can you make pointing to legal content hosted elsewhere illegal?
"In agreeing to these terms, you also agree to all future modifications of this TOS/license/EULA/etc." Many have language like this to let service providers and the like change their contract and auto-enroll people in the new language. I'm not sure how much legal muscle there is there, but a court doesn't even need to get to the point of a ruling. If a big enough company wanted to, they could tie someone up in court for years and then settle out of court. Their target would be bankrupt (or nearly so) and the point would have been made: Mess with Big Company and get your life destroyed.
First of all, how do you power the servers on the hubs? Where is the electricity coming from?
Secondly, where is the data connection to the hub coming from?
Lastly, who is administering the servers? Is it someone living in the US, UK, etc who remotes in? Or someone who lives on the "hub island"? If the latter, how do you get food and other essentials to the hub?
Now assume that some websites this hub is hosting makes the US and some other big countries angry. I'll even grant some leeway and assume that raiding the island and seizing the computers would be troublesome. No problem. Simply cut off the electrical feed, sever the data connection, arrest any off-hub personnel, and/or block any supply shipments for on-hub personnel. You've just brought the hub to its knees.
If an "international consortium" is managing the hub, who is on the consortium? What countries are they from? Would they be vulnerable to "attack" via friends/family members/interests based in those or other countries?
When the recording industry went after sites that pointed to (but didn't themselves host) pirated material, we shook our heads in amazement. How could pointing to something be illegal? Wouldn't the thing itself be illegal but saying "illegal thing is over here" just be informative?
Now the EU is actually going one worse. Apparently, having the article online is fine. No problem. Perfectly legal. However, a search engine saying "there's that legal thing over there" is illegal - in some vague circumstances.
Your house is not a public location. Since you control who can enter and exit, telling people to leave because they decided to turn your living room into a protest zone is perfectly fine. However, telling people that they can't march on the public sidewalk (not privately owned) with signs would be preventing their free speech. Similarly, I could try protesting in a mall, but they would be well within their rights to kick me out and ban me from re-entering. They couldn't prevent me from protesting on public property in front of the mall, but they could ban me from entering the mall itself.
Also, freedom to speak doesn't mean freedom to be heard. If a protester is handing out pamphlets and you refuse one, you haven't violated his freedom of speech. You're just refusing to listen to his speech (read the pamphlet). Now, if the government came by and told him not to hand out the pamphlets, they might be infringing on his freedom of speech.
It's even worse than that. The article gives the example of a company, KlearGear, trying to charge a couple because they left a negative review of the company. The wrinkle in this case: The negative review was posted three years before the lawsuit and before the "you can't criticize us online" text entered into the EULA. So the companies don't just want you to agree to whatever is in their EULA, they think you accepting the EULA means you also accept any future version of the EULA no matter what restrictions get added on.
In the case of the couple, the charge was sent to a collections agency which hurt the couple's credit rating. They, in turn, sued KlearGear to have the debt declared null and void. When KlearGear didn't show up to challenge the suit, the judge ruled in favor of the couple. What would have happened had KlearGear had a better legal team, though? Even if they didn't win, they could have easily tied the couple up in court for months or years, forcing them to bankruptcy with legal fees, until the company settled out of court with the couple. (Perhaps dropping the original fee in exchange for no precedent being set against the company and maybe even some token amount that wouldn't even cover the couples' legal costs.)
I agree that agreements can over-ride constitutional rights in some cases. For example, if I sign an NDA, I'm restricting my freedom of speech in a certain regard. However, these agreements should only be done on when something needs to be kept under wraps (details of a new product shown to reviewers early, for example), not as a matter-of-normal-business instituted when anyone has even the slightest business association with the company.
Because of the - rather idiotic if you ask me - distinction between the DVD content and the encryption "protecting" the DVD content.
I go into a store and buy a DVD. I then rip that DVD and store it on a hard drive for only my and my immediate, living-in-my-household family's use. Storing it on a hard drive wasn't the crime. It was breaking the encryption on the DVD disc that was illegal.
Actually, it might not even be me ripping the DVD that's illegal. Depending on local laws, this might be perfectly fine. However, making and offering a tool that breaks the DVD decryption would be considered an illegal act. In other words, doing X might be legal, but giving someone a tool that does X isn't.
Of course, about the only reason that ripping your own, legally purchased, DVDs and keeping them on your own systems (i.e. not sharing them out) might NOT be considered illegal is because it is an extremely hard action to catch. People who do this aren't leaving easily followed online tracks like people who share out rips do. While some might mention online that they do this, tracking down each person would take a ton of legal effort. The MPAA prefers the "low effort" route of suing people who share out rips and making the DVD ripping tools illegal.
That's because you realize that, if the NSA were to scrap their entire Internet spying program tomorrow, our percent chance of being directly affected by a terrorist attack would go up about 0.0000001% (and even that is probably overestimating it).
Don't forget that every mention of the word "bomb" being a possible threat. Even if used as to describe a bad movie ("The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie's gonna bomb at the box office") or as slang to describe something very good ("That burrito is da bomb."). It doesn't matter the context, it's a threat.
The fact that we haven't been attacked by mutant turtles wielding exploding burritos is thanks to the tireless work of the NSA!
Yes, the DMCA was good in that it exempted the site owners from being liable for user-generated content. Where is went wrong (in this specific area), though, was that there were effectively no penalties for false DMCA requests. If I don't like something online, I can file a DMCA request and threaten legal action if it isn't taken down. If I have enough legal muscle, I can essentially get whatever I want taken offline.
This "right to be forgotten" is doing the same thing. What if I tells Google to take down all links to an article because I want it forgotten? If it is a frivolous request (for example, if I'm trying to get Google to "forget" about a competitor of mine to improve my search rank), what legal penalties will I suffer? If there are none, then this is going to be abused like the DMCA is.