Google indexes and searches a lot of information, almost certainly more than LexisNexis.
According to Google's website, Google searches over 3 billion pages. According to Lexis's website, lexis covers 3.3 billion documents. I suspect that converting web pages into documents, Google would cover somewhat less than 3 billion documents. You should know that! Tsk tsk. Tell us about the lexis network infrastructure -- I've heard it's pretty cool.
Disclaimer: I'm an attorney that greatly prefers lexis.com over westlaw, but the above is entirely factual (at least, according to the respective services).
Re:The FTC now says they can regulate spam
on
FTC vs Spammers
·
· Score: 1
Second, this is potentially dangerous, as it could possibly open up business to liability when someone spams using their name in a deliberate attempt to defame the company (called a 'joe-job'). This has happened before, and I don't like the idea of the FTC holding companies responsible simply because some criminal (all spammers are criminals) decided to spam out the company's name. Of course, you would need to find some means to determine which businesses are really victims and which are really lying about being victims. Remember, spammers are liars, so companies who contract spam can be counted on to lie about it afterwards -- especially if there are financial consequences to their actions.
Just judging from the quote from the case, it shouldn't open businesses up to liability in the way you say. The spammer must be an "agent with actual or apparent authority." People who are trying to "defame" a company by spamming on its behalf certainly won't be "agents" in the legal sense (agency law is a well-developed area of law, and it is what the court was referring to), and it would be mostly likely trivial to prove that. Sure, the spammer could say "yes, I was their agent," but how much credible proof could he possibly show?
I think you're right, but a quibble: AOL bought Time-Warner, not the other way around. Also, Apple would never be able to buy Universal Pictures on Pixar's behalf -- Jobs is CEO of both companies, but Pixar is not related to Apple in any other way. It would be a pretty huge breach of fiduciary duty for Steve to "leverage" Apple for Pixar's benefit.
Mr Barillari wrote a nice article, but since he's not a lawyer, he doesn't know a pretty important point: this is just the complaint. The RIAA doesn't have to provide a watertight legal/logical argument in its complaint. It doesn't even have to allege true facts, as long as it reasonably believes those facts have a chance at being revealed true during discovery. All the RIAA needs to do in its complaint is state why the court has jurisdiction, hit each element of its claims, and claim whatever relief it wants -- bam, it has a complaint.
So it's nice and all that he argues all those points -- he may even be right on some of them -- but it's not like the complaint is the sum total of the RIAA's argument.
Very interesting post. But all of your points are technical points, not business points. It may be a fact that "There are too many players who don't know what they are really doing [from a technology standpoint], and who have no focused strategy [to developing robust IP]. They're just getting into wireless because it is the industry's newest buzzword." But they might know the business end inside-and-out. The many dotcoms that failed after the bubble burst didn't all fail because they were technologically inept (although certainly some where); they failed because their business strategy (if they had one) was ineffectual. To bring it out further -- with some minor tweaks in details, much of what you said can describe Microsoft's attempts at getting into certain spaces. Yet, for the most part, they've been successful, even with an inferior product. Why? Because the business people are really, really good.
The US has the same principle. NARA is for archives and records (hence the name); as you might expect, the US government has a LOT of archives and records, and it's good to have an agency that has as its sole mission to preserve everything for posterity.
You can get any federal documents that aren't classified (as in, "confidential" or "secret"), and the US government produces A LOT of documents. Also, laws like FOIA set general limits to how long classified documents can stay classified.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. While you're right that companies "ignore" what their shareholders want "all the time," this is mostly a function of the fact that shareholders have nothing to do with the day-to-day business operations of the companies in which they hold shares. In the end, though, every company is accountable to their shareholders. Piss enough shareholders off, and the board will be replaced (and, consequently, the management). Google, as a company, is certainly not immune to this. In fact, it's more susceptible to it because of the amount of capital it has gotten from the powerhouse venture funds Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital; Kleiner and Sequoia are certainly substantial shareholders.
On the flip side, you are now responsible to the investors to keep the company profitable, and every now and then kick back a slice of your earnings to your investors as dividends.
Like I said above, you're ALWAYS responsible to your investors; whether you're public or private is irrelevant.
Shareholder rights are managed like a pure democracy -- majority rules. This is why you usually see that "Pres So-and-so" owns 51% of the stock in the company... so their vote can always override whatever the public decides, providing that they disagree with the public. This is where stock options have an effect; directors giving themselves gobs of company stock in place of salary.
Yes, it's a democracy of sorts, but no, you don't usually see presidents or CEOs of companies own 51% of a company (for example, Larry Ellison holds about 25% of Oracle; Bill Gates holds about 12% of Microsoft) and no, this is not where stock options have effect (they would have effect if they were exercised. However, for SEC reporting purposes, these percentages will include VESTED options -- which gives you even more of an idea of how much less than 51% big shareholders hold).
Now, it's not a good idea to piss off your investors, because they'll just turn and sell your stock, and you have to pay that capital back.
What in the world? To whom would you have to pay the capital back? This is just wrong. You (the issuing company) sell stock to the public, and then that ends the relationship. All subsequent stock transfers have nothing to do with you. All sales on the stock markets (NYSE, NASDAQ, etc.) are essentially person to person (for practical purposes, it's not, but legally it is), definitely not company to person.
Bill Campbell Chairman and former CEO Intuit Corp.
Millard Drexler Chairman and CEO J. Crew
Albert Gore Jr. Former Vice President of the United States
Steve Jobs CEO, Apple CEO, Pixar
Arthur D. Levinson, Ph. D. Chairman and CEO Genentech
Jerry York President and CEO Micro Warehouse
Where are the lawyers? I don't understand your statement. And what would be wrong with having lawyer on the BOD (assuming conflicts of interest don't exist)?
I seriously doubt that "everybody" would do this. Before any discussion of Internet sales taxes, did "everybody" buy their computers (or anything else, for that matter) online, to avoid sales taxes? Certainly not. It's just a matter of convenience. With respect to your comment, it sounds like the levy will be on whole systems. People will buy whole computers for myriad reasons, including just because they don't want to deal with getting someone to build a computer for them, or because they don't know anyone who knows how to do it.
You're right that there will be people trying to avoid the levy. But it sounds like a sales tax, which people all over the world try their best to avoid. Despite this, you don't see countries requiring registration of goods because of sales tax avoidance.
Now, if it's actually not a levy but rather a more complicated form of tax, then I could see registration being a (remote) possibility...
Why would you have to register the computer? It's called a "copyright levy" in the article, and a "levy" is "levied" at sale. Thus, it's just added onto the price (like a sales tax) when you buy it. Not that I support such a tax in any way -- it's just like the horrible additional tax in some countries (like Canada) levied on CD-Rs and other kinds of recordable media.
law firms are in trouble because they thought that bankruptcy practices would never again be profitable or needed.
Where in the world did you hear this? I have never heard this, at least among large firms. It just wouldn't make sense to get rid of an existing bankruptcy practice, which is what you imply. Bankruptcy law existed before, during, and after the bubble; no lawyer I know thought that bankruptcy law would ever be gone.
If you're thinking about firms that don't have bankruptcy practices at all, you misunderstand the nature of bankruptcy. Firms that tend to represent fledgling, highly risky privately-financed companies, like tech firms, for example, really shouldn't have bankruptcy practices because of potential conflicts of interest. While one could envision a strongly "walled-off" bankruptcy practice within such firms, it would be impractical and, yes, a waste of money. But the decision not to have a bankruptcy practice based on the foregoing certainly doesn't evidence that such firms believed that no one would ever go bankrupt again. On the contrary, even during the boom it was very hard for a company to succeed; it's not like these companies stopped facing the prospect of bankruptcy for a few years in the late 90s and early 2000. It was very much a specter.
Finally, if you're thinking specifically about a certain tech law firm that recently went away, and you think it's because of a lack of a bankruptcy practice, you'd be dead wrong, for the reasons I've already stated -- yes, business dropped significantly after the burst, but because of conflicts of interest, the firm would never have made up for it with a bankruptcy practice.
Remember that it's not really completely up to them. The VCs and other investors that have funded Google's growth over the years are waiting for a liquidity event, which is going to be an IPO. VCs don't pour money into a company without making sure they can get a return.
google: v To search, particularly on the Internet. Et.: Google is the trademarked name of the Internet search engine at www.google.com.
I really don't think this is sufficient. Google is trying to prevent the "genericide" of their trademark, which is why the attorney says "This definition implies that "google" is a verb synonymous with 'search.' . . . we want to make sure that when people use 'Google,' they are referring to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching in general." Just mentioning that Google is a trademark owned by Google Technology wouldn't give any protection against genericide; "google" is still being defined generally as "to search." (It would, incidentally, protect against other trademark issues, but in this context, there's nothing other than genericide that's a likely problem.)
A satisfactory change would probably be "to search the search engine owned and operated by Google Technology, Inc." I don't know if this is what Paul wants to do, but I'm sure this is the alternative to deletion that the trademark counsel intends. Put it this way: Google is not stupid. They know that the use of "google" as a verb is a good thing for the company. But they also know that to be good for them, "to google" MUST refer to searching on www.google.com, not any other engine.
Despite what the other posters are saying, you're absolutely right -- the GPL and your typical EULA are fundamentally exactly the same thing. That's the beauty of the GPL, really. It relies on the same exact legal mechanism as typical EULAs to work.
That said, there are certainly distinctions. The obvious distinction is in the terms of the agreements -- it's just that the GPL's terms we like better than a typical EULA's. One could argue that the spirit of the GPL is really fundamentally different than a typical EULA, but so what? I think when you say "most people seem to have a lot of problems with EULAs" you really mean that most people have a lot of problems with the terms of many companies' EULAs. Fair enough -- you encounter that kind of problem every day of your entire life in other situations.
Another important difference is the point in time at which the license is agreed to. WRT EULAs, like the GPL itself says in section 5, "You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it. " I don't think a typical EULA uses this language, but rest assured that this is one of those points that is obvious, if you know copyright rules and you think about it. With typical EULAs, you're bound when you buy the software and open the plastic wrapper. That's a choice that the copyright owner makes, and it's an obvious choice -- it's the earliest point at which a licensor can reasonably argue that the licensee is bound. With GPL'ed software, the moment of being bound that was chosen is, of course, when a developer modifies or tries to distribute the software. Same thing, different point in time.
A little nit -- it's not a safe harbor statement. The quote is just a part of the "Risk Factors" section of their 10-Q. There's no safe harbor to enjoy by putting in a risk factor; they're required in most filings under the '33 and '34 Acts.
Some of the statements that you talk about that are at the bottom of business wire announcements, however, are safe harbor statements -- anything that properly talks about "forward-looking" statements affords the company a safe harbor that protects against certain private securities law actions that are based on misstatements/omissions of material facts.
First, this site is for federal regulations: rules promulgated by federal agencies that have been given power by Congress to pass these kinds of rules. These aren't laws passed by Congress, so you won't be seeing the DMCA on it. (But yes, these are laws in the sense that they have the force of law; you have to follow them.)
Second, federal agencies to some extent already do this, and it works. My experience is with the SEC, which is admittedly always pretty on the ball for a government agency. For many years, the SEC has had an RFC procedure for its proposed rules. (In the past decade or so, it has accepted comments electronically.) It solicits comments for a period of time, and then publishes them all. For the most part, law firms, accountants, companies, and academics will respond, but it's not uncommon to get comments from random unidentified people that aren't practicing lawyers, accountants, etc. Usually, and naturally, comments from the public are a lot more practical and a lot easier to understand, and yes, the SEC will consider them too (sometimes the SEC, in later releases, will quote the commenter, and more than a few times where Joe Shmoe gets a quote -- I suppose it's because they want individual investor perspectives, but rarely get them, so they get excited when one actually writes in).
I just thought it was important to remind people that this decision is limited to the United States only. No other country in the world has abandonded the principals of the public domain, which means that in our interconnected world, there will be states that provide a safe haven for the distribution of information that should be public domain.
What?? PLEASE DO YOUR HOMEWORK. The Sonny Bono Act extension of the copyright terms equal the WIPO World Copyright Treaty terms from the Berne Convention, which almost all of Europe follows. Thirty-five countries are party to the treaty. The EU's Information Society Directive required EU members to implement the terms of the treaty by the end of last year.
What possibly made you think that the world was any different, aside from your obvious bias against the US?
Breyer and Stevens wrote the minority. Please don't bother ascribing "Republican" and "Democrat" to the opinions-- it's worse than useless. FWIW, which is very little, Breyer was a Democrat appointee and Stevens was a Republican appointee. Ginsburg, who wrote the majority, was a Democrat appointee.
If you weren't thinking along these lines, sorry! It's just that I've read comments along these ridiculous lines far too often...
Breyer and Stevens were in the minority; Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee, wrote the majority opinion.
PLEASE -- I'm sick and tired of this Republican v. Democrat distinction from people who think that's actually how the Supreme Court decides things. The distinctions between o Republican and Democrats are worthless when it comes to writing opinions. What matters is their jurisprudential attitude and their slant on law and society -- how are laws made, interpreted, and how do they change over time; what they think is the main purpose of law in society; what they think is the main purpose of government in society; what they think is the main purpose and purview of the judicial system in society.
These are ideas that don't really track the Republican-Democrat distinction. Perhaps they track a conservative-liberal distinction better, but that's not such a helpful notion either, anyway, unless you're talking about conservative/liberal jurisprudential attitude and conservative/liberal slants re law and society.
I know many, many people who earn 100K or more, and I can certainly say that not a single one of them pays only a "couple percent" in taxes -- try well over 30%, including state income tax and other state-related things. What "corporate deductions" for people are you talking about? How much do you think personal deductions can get you? Over the past 20 years Congress has closed the loops on a lot of deductions, and at any rate the alternative minimum tax requires for really rich people at least a mid-20s percent tax.
Furthermore, not many people (even twenty years ago) are able to take advantage of "loopholes" in the tax code -- you need to be very rich, much much richer than a measly 100K per year, to use the few existing loopholes in a meaningful way.
Slashdot Mirror
Google indexes and searches a lot of information, almost certainly more than LexisNexis.
According to Google's website, Google searches over 3 billion pages. According to Lexis's website, lexis covers 3.3 billion documents. I suspect that converting web pages into documents, Google would cover somewhat less than 3 billion documents. You should know that! Tsk tsk. Tell us about the lexis network infrastructure -- I've heard it's pretty cool.
Disclaimer: I'm an attorney that greatly prefers lexis.com over westlaw, but the above is entirely factual (at least, according to the respective services).
Second, this is potentially dangerous, as it could possibly open up business to liability when someone spams using their name in a deliberate attempt to defame the company (called a 'joe-job'). This has happened before, and I don't like the idea of the FTC holding companies responsible simply because some criminal (all spammers are criminals) decided to spam out the company's name. Of course, you would need to find some means to determine which businesses are really victims and which are really lying about being victims. Remember, spammers are liars, so companies who contract spam can be counted on to lie about it afterwards -- especially if there are financial consequences to their actions.
Just judging from the quote from the case, it shouldn't open businesses up to liability in the way you say. The spammer must be an "agent with actual or apparent authority." People who are trying to "defame" a company by spamming on its behalf certainly won't be "agents" in the legal sense (agency law is a well-developed area of law, and it is what the court was referring to), and it would be mostly likely trivial to prove that. Sure, the spammer could say "yes, I was their agent," but how much credible proof could he possibly show?
In fact, I especially need sites that will teach them about computers, so that they'll be able to better keep in touch with me, when we're all older.
What makes you think you'll still know computers better than them when you're all older?
I think you're right, but a quibble: AOL bought Time-Warner, not the other way around. Also, Apple would never be able to buy Universal Pictures on Pixar's behalf -- Jobs is CEO of both companies, but Pixar is not related to Apple in any other way. It would be a pretty huge breach of fiduciary duty for Steve to "leverage" Apple for Pixar's benefit.
Princeton doesn't have a law school.
Mr Barillari wrote a nice article, but since he's not a lawyer, he doesn't know a pretty important point: this is just the complaint. The RIAA doesn't have to provide a watertight legal/logical argument in its complaint. It doesn't even have to allege true facts, as long as it reasonably believes those facts have a chance at being revealed true during discovery. All the RIAA needs to do in its complaint is state why the court has jurisdiction, hit each element of its claims, and claim whatever relief it wants -- bam, it has a complaint.
So it's nice and all that he argues all those points -- he may even be right on some of them -- but it's not like the complaint is the sum total of the RIAA's argument.
Very interesting post. But all of your points are technical points, not business points. It may be a fact that "There are too many players who don't know what they are really doing [from a technology standpoint], and who have no focused strategy [to developing robust IP]. They're just getting into wireless because it is the industry's newest buzzword." But they might know the business end inside-and-out. The many dotcoms that failed after the bubble burst didn't all fail because they were technologically inept (although certainly some where); they failed because their business strategy (if they had one) was ineffectual. To bring it out further -- with some minor tweaks in details, much of what you said can describe Microsoft's attempts at getting into certain spaces. Yet, for the most part, they've been successful, even with an inferior product. Why? Because the business people are really, really good.
The US has the same principle. NARA is for archives and records (hence the name); as you might expect, the US government has a LOT of archives and records, and it's good to have an agency that has as its sole mission to preserve everything for posterity.
You can get any federal documents that aren't classified (as in, "confidential" or "secret"), and the US government produces A LOT of documents. Also, laws like FOIA set general limits to how long classified documents can stay classified.
A lot of what you say is completely wrong.
All the time.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. While you're right that companies "ignore" what their shareholders want "all the time," this is mostly a function of the fact that shareholders have nothing to do with the day-to-day business operations of the companies in which they hold shares. In the end, though, every company is accountable to their shareholders. Piss enough shareholders off, and the board will be replaced (and, consequently, the management). Google, as a company, is certainly not immune to this. In fact, it's more susceptible to it because of the amount of capital it has gotten from the powerhouse venture funds Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital; Kleiner and Sequoia are certainly substantial shareholders.
On the flip side, you are now responsible to the investors to keep the company profitable, and every now and then kick back a slice of your earnings to your investors as dividends.
Like I said above, you're ALWAYS responsible to your investors; whether you're public or private is irrelevant.
Shareholder rights are managed like a pure democracy -- majority rules. This is why you usually see that "Pres So-and-so" owns 51% of the stock in the company... so their vote can always override whatever the public decides, providing that they disagree with the public. This is where stock options have an effect; directors giving themselves gobs of company stock in place of salary.
Yes, it's a democracy of sorts, but no, you don't usually see presidents or CEOs of companies own 51% of a company (for example, Larry Ellison holds about 25% of Oracle; Bill Gates holds about 12% of Microsoft) and no, this is not where stock options have effect (they would have effect if they were exercised. However, for SEC reporting purposes, these percentages will include VESTED options -- which gives you even more of an idea of how much less than 51% big shareholders hold).
Now, it's not a good idea to piss off your investors, because they'll just turn and sell your stock, and you have to pay that capital back.
What in the world? To whom would you have to pay the capital back? This is just wrong. You (the issuing company) sell stock to the public, and then that ends the relationship. All subsequent stock transfers have nothing to do with you. All sales on the stock markets (NYSE, NASDAQ, etc.) are essentially person to person (for practical purposes, it's not, but legally it is), definitely not company to person.
Beats another lawyer....
These are the directors of Apple:
Bill Campbell
Chairman and former CEO
Intuit Corp.
Millard Drexler
Chairman and CEO
J. Crew
Albert Gore Jr.
Former Vice President of the United States
Steve Jobs
CEO, Apple
CEO, Pixar
Arthur D. Levinson, Ph. D.
Chairman and CEO
Genentech
Jerry York
President and CEO
Micro Warehouse
Where are the lawyers? I don't understand your statement. And what would be wrong with having lawyer on the BOD (assuming conflicts of interest don't exist)?
I seriously doubt that "everybody" would do this. Before any discussion of Internet sales taxes, did "everybody" buy their computers (or anything else, for that matter) online, to avoid sales taxes? Certainly not. It's just a matter of convenience. With respect to your comment, it sounds like the levy will be on whole systems. People will buy whole computers for myriad reasons, including just because they don't want to deal with getting someone to build a computer for them, or because they don't know anyone who knows how to do it.
You're right that there will be people trying to avoid the levy. But it sounds like a sales tax, which people all over the world try their best to avoid. Despite this, you don't see countries requiring registration of goods because of sales tax avoidance.
Now, if it's actually not a levy but rather a more complicated form of tax, then I could see registration being a (remote) possibility...
Why would you have to register the computer? It's called a "copyright levy" in the article, and a "levy" is "levied" at sale. Thus, it's just added onto the price (like a sales tax) when you buy it. Not that I support such a tax in any way -- it's just like the horrible additional tax in some countries (like Canada) levied on CD-Rs and other kinds of recordable media.
wonder what would happen if I called Redmond and told them I need them to ship me a replacement :)
Why don't you try? I don't know of anyone has ever done this, but doesn'titsound reasonable? Tell them you'll send them the disks you want to replace.
law firms are in trouble because they thought that bankruptcy practices would never again be profitable or needed.
Where in the world did you hear this? I have never heard this, at least among large firms. It just wouldn't make sense to get rid of an existing bankruptcy practice, which is what you imply. Bankruptcy law existed before, during, and after the bubble; no lawyer I know thought that bankruptcy law would ever be gone.
If you're thinking about firms that don't have bankruptcy practices at all, you misunderstand the nature of bankruptcy. Firms that tend to represent fledgling, highly risky privately-financed companies, like tech firms, for example, really shouldn't have bankruptcy practices because of potential conflicts of interest. While one could envision a strongly "walled-off" bankruptcy practice within such firms, it would be impractical and, yes, a waste of money. But the decision not to have a bankruptcy practice based on the foregoing certainly doesn't evidence that such firms believed that no one would ever go bankrupt again. On the contrary, even during the boom it was very hard for a company to succeed; it's not like these companies stopped facing the prospect of bankruptcy for a few years in the late 90s and early 2000. It was very much a specter.
Finally, if you're thinking specifically about a certain tech law firm that recently went away, and you think it's because of a lack of a bankruptcy practice, you'd be dead wrong, for the reasons I've already stated -- yes, business dropped significantly after the burst, but because of conflicts of interest, the firm would never have made up for it with a bankruptcy practice.
Remember that it's not really completely up to them. The VCs and other investors that have funded Google's growth over the years are waiting for a liquidity event, which is going to be an IPO. VCs don't pour money into a company without making sure they can get a return.
google: v To search, particularly on the Internet. Et.: Google is the trademarked name of the Internet search engine at www.google.com.
I really don't think this is sufficient. Google is trying to prevent the "genericide" of their trademark, which is why the attorney says "This definition implies that "google" is a verb synonymous with 'search.' . . . we want to make sure that when people use 'Google,' they are referring to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching in general." Just mentioning that Google is a trademark owned by Google Technology wouldn't give any protection against genericide; "google" is still being defined generally as "to search." (It would, incidentally, protect against other trademark issues, but in this context, there's nothing other than genericide that's a likely problem.)
A satisfactory change would probably be "to search the search engine owned and operated by Google Technology, Inc." I don't know if this is what Paul wants to do, but I'm sure this is the alternative to deletion that the trademark counsel intends. Put it this way: Google is not stupid. They know that the use of "google" as a verb is a good thing for the company. But they also know that to be good for them, "to google" MUST refer to searching on www.google.com, not any other engine.
Despite what the other posters are saying, you're absolutely right -- the GPL and your typical EULA are fundamentally exactly the same thing. That's the beauty of the GPL, really. It relies on the same exact legal mechanism as typical EULAs to work.
That said, there are certainly distinctions. The obvious distinction is in the terms of the agreements -- it's just that the GPL's terms we like better than a typical EULA's. One could argue that the spirit of the GPL is really fundamentally different than a typical EULA, but so what? I think when you say "most people seem to have a lot of problems with EULAs" you really mean that most people have a lot of problems with the terms of many companies' EULAs. Fair enough -- you encounter that kind of problem every day of your entire life in other situations.
Another important difference is the point in time at which the license is agreed to. WRT EULAs, like the GPL itself says in section 5, "You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it. " I don't think a typical EULA uses this language, but rest assured that this is one of those points that is obvious, if you know copyright rules and you think about it. With typical EULAs, you're bound when you buy the software and open the plastic wrapper. That's a choice that the copyright owner makes, and it's an obvious choice -- it's the earliest point at which a licensor can reasonably argue that the licensee is bound. With GPL'ed software, the moment of being bound that was chosen is, of course, when a developer modifies or tries to distribute the software. Same thing, different point in time.
A little nit -- it's not a safe harbor statement. The quote is just a part of the "Risk Factors" section of their 10-Q. There's no safe harbor to enjoy by putting in a risk factor; they're required in most filings under the '33 and '34 Acts.
Some of the statements that you talk about that are at the bottom of business wire announcements, however, are safe harbor statements -- anything that properly talks about "forward-looking" statements affords the company a safe harbor that protects against certain private securities law actions that are based on misstatements/omissions of material facts.
First, this site is for federal regulations: rules promulgated by federal agencies that have been given power by Congress to pass these kinds of rules. These aren't laws passed by Congress, so you won't be seeing the DMCA on it. (But yes, these are laws in the sense that they have the force of law; you have to follow them.)
Second, federal agencies to some extent already do this, and it works. My experience is with the SEC, which is admittedly always pretty on the ball for a government agency. For many years, the SEC has had an RFC procedure for its proposed rules. (In the past decade or so, it has accepted comments electronically.) It solicits comments for a period of time, and then publishes them all. For the most part, law firms, accountants, companies, and academics will respond, but it's not uncommon to get comments from random unidentified people that aren't practicing lawyers, accountants, etc. Usually, and naturally, comments from the public are a lot more practical and a lot easier to understand, and yes, the SEC will consider them too (sometimes the SEC, in later releases, will quote the commenter, and more than a few times where Joe Shmoe gets a quote -- I suppose it's because they want individual investor perspectives, but rarely get them, so they get excited when one actually writes in).
I just thought it was important to remind people that this decision is limited to the United States only. No other country in the world has abandonded the principals of the public domain, which means that in our interconnected world, there will be states that provide a safe haven for the distribution of information that should be public domain.
What?? PLEASE DO YOUR HOMEWORK. The Sonny Bono Act extension of the copyright terms equal the WIPO World Copyright Treaty terms from the Berne Convention, which almost all of Europe follows. Thirty-five countries are party to the treaty. The EU's Information Society Directive required EU members to implement the terms of the treaty by the end of last year.
What possibly made you think that the world was any different, aside from your obvious bias against the US?
Read Balkin's blog. He thinks that the Eldred case can be used to get the DMCA declared unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.
Breyer and Stevens wrote the minority. Please don't bother ascribing "Republican" and "Democrat" to the opinions-- it's worse than useless. FWIW, which is very little, Breyer was a Democrat appointee and Stevens was a Republican appointee. Ginsburg, who wrote the majority, was a Democrat appointee.
If you weren't thinking along these lines, sorry! It's just that I've read comments along these ridiculous lines far too often...
Breyer and Stevens were in the minority; Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee, wrote the majority opinion.
PLEASE -- I'm sick and tired of this Republican v. Democrat distinction from people who think that's actually how the Supreme Court decides things. The distinctions between o Republican and Democrats are worthless when it comes to writing opinions. What matters is their jurisprudential attitude and their slant on law and society -- how are laws made, interpreted, and how do they change over time; what they think is the main purpose of law in society; what they think is the main purpose of government in society; what they think is the main purpose and purview of the judicial system in society.
These are ideas that don't really track the Republican-Democrat distinction. Perhaps they track a conservative-liberal distinction better, but that's not such a helpful notion either, anyway, unless you're talking about conservative/liberal jurisprudential attitude and conservative/liberal slants re law and society.
I know many, many people who earn 100K or more, and I can certainly say that not a single one of them pays only a "couple percent" in taxes -- try well over 30%, including state income tax and other state-related things. What "corporate deductions" for people are you talking about? How much do you think personal deductions can get you? Over the past 20 years Congress has closed the loops on a lot of deductions, and at any rate the alternative minimum tax requires for really rich people at least a mid-20s percent tax.
Furthermore, not many people (even twenty years ago) are able to take advantage of "loopholes" in the tax code -- you need to be very rich, much much richer than a measly 100K per year, to use the few existing loopholes in a meaningful way.
I know dozens of people who earn around 100K, and none of them flies first class. None of them believe (rightly) that they can afford it.