I wasn't saying he deserved his salary; only that you shouldn't talk out of your ass. Whether he deserves his salary is an entirely different issue.
What matters to me is if my AOL stock goes up or down; I would be up in arms if I heard that Case got a raise or was earning a ridiculous amount of money even as I watched my stock price drop. He would certainly not deserve the increase or stability in his salary. But it doesn't look like that's the case -- it was $1 million in 2001, and $1 million in 2000. Thus, I'm up in arms only about the stupidity (or ineptness of the execution) of the AOL-TW merger, which, btw, is certainly enough for me to demand that Case step down.
Look: FUD, even when accompanied by the truth, is still FUD. I'm always against FUD, be it MSFT or Linus or anyone else.
Try reading the latest AOL SEC filings, or at least look up AOL's profile on yahoo finance. Case's salary in 2001 was $1 million, with no bonus. Annual report season is coming up; you can find out how much he earned last year pretty soon. I doubt it was more than $1 million. Stock option grants were fairly significant when the merger closed, but it doesn't look like he got anything since then, and frankly it wouldn't have mattered, since I think they're all underwater right now -- AOL has been tanking for a while.
Please, just do your homework before posting. Yes, Case is a rich guy -- heading AOL for the past decade has clearly been very, very good to him -- but talking out of your ass makes you sound dumb, drowning out your very good point that the AOL-TW merger was pretty much pointless, and will (has) cost investors many billions of dollars.
This is exactly right. The decision to actually sue is fundamentally a business decision -- it's the business people's job to make that decision with all the info it needs. Lawyers are not there to make business decisions for the business people.
They coach their clients strongly to persue every available legal option by using the tried and true "scare tactic" marketing technique: "If you DON'T sue them, think what the NEXT person might do - you don't want your product to get away from you!".
This is called their ethical duty. Because otherwise, the business person will sue their lawyer for malpractice when one of the "next persons" actually does something bad to them.
I haven't seen Erin Brockovich, but somehow, I still know what contingency means. My above statement stands.
Do you really understand? I don't actually disagree with you and the sentiment that no one works hard enough to earn $60000 per hour. But I don't see how a predetermined percentage of a damages award -- determined, obviously, before knowing what the award was going to be -- is bad. I don't care how much money their fee turned out to be -- the fact is that it was determined beforehand that they'd get whatever percentage if they won, and nothing if they lost. I'm not saying they *deserved* $60000 per hour; I'm saying that that's the gamble they took when they decided to represent the plaintiffs. A very rough analogy: you start a software company that sells a Linux-based OS that truly is a MSFT-killer -- it's the best desktop OS by far, so everyone switches to it, taking the place of MSFT. You went public early on, but in the past 3 years your founder shares have skyrocketed, and suddenly you're worth $60 billion (like I said, your company replaced MSFT) more than the initial value of the shares. Assuming you worked 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, you've earned $2283105 per hour. Is that fair? Should there have been a cap for you? Did you or did you not deserve the capital gain?
My point, of course, is that it doesn't matter at all that you're worth an obscene amount of money. You put in the initial investment, you worked hard to make the company succeeed, but in the end, your worth is *entirely dependent* on the whims of the market. Same with the tobacco lawyers (notwithstanding the fact that the judge reduced substantially the jury award, and the fact that most of the lawyers were Attorneys-General of several states): they agreed with the plaintiffs that they would get X amount of the damages, which were completely at the whim of the jury/judge. Just because it was a windfall doesn't mean it wasn't fair -- that was the gamble, and it paid off.
Another, much less appropriate analogy: you put in $10 on Monday to win the weekly lottery, which was worth, say, $1 million. On Saturday, it turns out that for some reason a lot more than the usual number of participants play that week, so the lottery is for $100 million. Then you win. Should you be forced to give back $99 million, because it "wasn't fair" -- you didn't expect to win that much? That would be ridiculous.
First of all, who's to say they didn't earn it? How do you know how much they deserved? Are you the final arbiter of what everyone should be earning? You probably think there should be caps to salary for everyone, from a janitor to an astronaut, based on someone's (or some committee's) idea of "what's fair."
Second, the lawyers from the outset took a contingency fee -- a percentage of the outcome IF THEY WON. The fact that the jury ended up deciding an outrageously high damages award obviously had no bearing on the initial setting of a percentage of the damages, if any. Haven't you ever seen Erin Brockovich?
However, mandating by law that you need it before you can do it is just a restraint of trade obstacle put up by people who want to limit the competition they have.
That's silly. Of course it's a restraint of trade, but it's a necessary one. Licensing is the best way to make accountability easier.
Look at the legal field, for example. A lot of legal work can easily be done by experienced non-lawyers, but not legally.
Anyone can do their own legal work -- there's nothing that prevents you from doing anything for yourself. The problem is when you are representing to someone else that you are able to do the work *for them.* Sure, some legal work can be done by experienced non-lawyers; there's no question about that. The problem is what happens if those non-lawyers screw up. All lawyers in every jurisdiction need to be licensed, which means a number of things: they have to prove a minimum level of knowledge, they have to prove a minimum level of moral character, and most importantly, they have to register with the people in charge of licensing. That's the most important thing, because if the lawyer screws up, *the appropriate authorities can find him and keep track of him.* Really, that's the essential function of licensure. If you didn't have such requirements, a non-lawyer could do a crappy job, take your money, and run, never to be found again. Most lawyers, however, aren't about to go through the onerous process of getting licensed only to take their first client's money and run -- it would be a waste of 7 years of school, thousands of hours of studying for law school and the bar exam, hundreds of dollars in fees for the application to the bar, and thousands more dollars for malpractice insurance and other fees that are required before being able to actually practice.
The same is true of the medical profession. I'm not interested in non-PhD medical attention, but I don't think that means that some people shouldn't have that option, especially if someone with lesser credentials can treat minor health problems for a lot less money.
You mean "non-MD" medical attention -- PhD's, without MD's, can't practice medicine.
Again, it's not a question of having the OPTION. It's a question of making accountability EASIER.
Instead of mandating certification, I'd be more in favor of a "malpractice" solution. If you claim you can do X and are in the business of doing X and you screw up, then you owe me double damages or something that would provide a strong disincentive for dishonesty or incompetance.
Again, this won't work because it doesn't make accountability any easier. Your scheme would result in a rush of thousands of "doctors" and "lawyers" who take patients/clients, fuck up, and run away with their money.
Interesting. So do you think Microsoft didn't treat its employees very well early on? How would it have survived (read: gotten to where it is now) if it hadn't treated its employees well early on?
Getting "certified" means that the CA Supreme Court -- which, unlike lower courts, has discretion in taking on cases -- has decided it will hear a case. The Court will only rule, however, on the questions of law that it wants to -- the "certified questions." These questions are presented in the application for certification. If it grants certification ("cert"), the court will announce the issues it wants to rule on. Once they do this, the parties can only argue those certified issues.
Here, the 9th Circuit has asked the CA Supreme Court to rule on a particular issue of law, and only that issue. (Appellants can certify questions, too, but here a federal court has decided that the federal court system isn't the appropriate place to decide what sounds like a novel state law question.) If it decides to grant cert, the CA S.Ct. can decide to take the formulation of the 9th Cir's question, or reformulate it, but it will rule only on the formulation of the question it decides on.
What I'm saying is that it's *not* different. There are no laws limiting the number of people being sued OR the number of people suing in a particular suit, as long as the issues are the same or nearly the same (this brings in issues with joinder and pendent or supplemental jurisdiction, but it's still all about personal jurisdiction). There's no good interest to be served for passing a law like that, and would possibly be unconstitutional anyway. The only issue (wrt to the number of parties, aside from standing issues) is whether the court has power over the parties (personal jurisdiction). It just doesn't matter that 500 people/corporations want to sue 1 person/corporation, 500 people/corporations want to sue 1 person/corporation, or even 500 people/corporations want to sue 500 other people/corporations.
The earlier post to which I'd responded said that there would/should be a difference between 500 people suing a corporation and one corporation suing suing 500 people. Clearly, there's no problem with that -- one person could certainly sue 500 corporations, no? The number is irrelevant.
What state do you would have a different outcome? AFAIK, all states require that the secret holder take resonable precaustions to protect their secret. If you lawfully obtain the secret without signing an NDA, you are legally allowed to disclose it.
I actually didn't mean to say KFC here; I'm sorry. I only meant that there have been several cases in several states in which owners of trade secrets whose secrets were otherwise essentially not secret -- but were treating the knowledge as secret anyway -- were able to sue successfully parties who obtained and disclosed the knowledge unauthorized. It's just one of those weird things.
The KFC case *is* different. The house buyers accidentally came across the secret recipe. In this case, there was already a lot of legal brouhaha over the publication of the code for deCSS; the plaintiffs in the case knew this, and republished anyway. (In fact, the plaintiffs use that argument to defend themselves: that the fact that the code was already published rendered the information public and thus not secret.) The difference is that there was no misappropriation to speak of in the KFC situation, but there may have been in the deCSS case.
You're absolutely right though: the defendants can make a very credible argument against being subject to violating trade secret laws. All I'm saying is that trade secret laws sometimes lead to screwy results, and that they definitely have the weakest jurisprudential basis of any form of IP on which to make easy predictions.
It certainly depends on the state trade secret laws, because the same situation would result in KFC winning in several states. At any rate, I'm sure you can see how the Col. Sanders case is a bit different. The issue there isn't so much whether the disclosure was unauthorized, but whether there was disclosure at all. Say, for example, someone serendipitously stumbles upon the KFC recipe (just like finding it in your attic) and then publishes it. There's no disclosure, much less unauthorized disclosure, so KFC can't sue under trade secret law.
If it was treated as a trade secret, and the disclosure was unauthorized, the owner of the secret can certainly sue the disclosers even if it's no longer a secret.
Here's the funny thing (and I think you were thinking about this situation): say, for example, Coca-Cola disclosed to Cadbury-Schweppes, RC Cola, and every rum manufacturer in the western hemisphere the secret formula to Coke, under NDA. A disgruntled Coca-Cola employee then without authorization discloses the formula to Pepsi, which uses it to make "Pepsi II." Coca-Cola can sue Pepsi (and the disgruntled employee) under trade secret law (depending on the state, since trade secret laws are state laws), *even though it's not really a secret after all the other disclosures.* Now, it depends on the state, but Coca-Cola would win this situation in at least a few states.
So they want permission to able to do a sort of "reverse class-action", where they're allowed to sue everyone at once.
This has nothing to do with getting permission to sue a lot of people at the same time. The law gives a powerful incentive for a plaintiff in a certain matter to sue *everyone* that he thinks might be at fault at the time of the suit, because after the judgment is final, the plaintiff might be barred from suing anyone else wrt the same issues. Collateral estoppel (or, as it's called now, issue preclusion) is principally a judicial economy concept that's been around for quite a while.
The other thing to think about is that there's no fundamental difference between a corporation wanting to sue 500 people and a person wanting to sue 500 corporations (aside from cost and the fact that there are more people than corporations). Both people AND corporations -- litigants -- have had the ability to sue 500 of anything for a very long time. If you think, oh, but a corporation is evil blah blah blah, well, you may be right, but the courts can't and won't assume something like that.
This case is about personal jurisdiction -- whether a court has power over certain litigants to hear and decide issues between them. It's an extremely important case, but it's certainly not about whether one can sue lots of people at once. The problem for the RIAA/MPAA is that because the defendants are all over the world, it's hard to say that the court in Santa Clara County, CA has the power to hale them all in and make final judgments over all of them. If the court rules against them about this issue, then the RIAA/MPAA has to sue the defendants in the courts that actually have power over them. But if, for example, all 500 defendants lived in CA, *there wouldn't be a question at ALL.*
Hm. As far as I can tell, the GPL uses the same definition of "derivative work" as in copyright law. See section 0:... "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language."
Compare to section 101 of the copyright act: "A ''derivative work'' is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as [examples] or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ''derivative work''."
One might argue about whether the GPL's clause "that is,..." is a modifying clause or a descriptive clause, and a court would definitely look into that issue, but I think RMS definitely intended that "derivative work" mean the same as in copyright law. In fact, since he doesn't use the legal convention of capitalizing defined terms for "derivative work" (as he does for "Program"), I think a court would certainly apply the copyright law definition.
Granted, the meaning of "derivative work" has been highly contested over the years. To answer your other question, the meaning of "derivative work" for purposes of applying general copyright law to, say, the enforceability of the GPL, or specific situations that the GPL doesn't cover (this is called "gap-filling") will *always* be the meaning from copyright law. The only time "derivative work" as defined in the GPL (assuming, for now, it's actually different) would take precedence over the meaning in copyright law is in each instance that the GPL itself uses "derivative work" AND clearly uses it as a defined term RATHER than the general term. Very roughly like variable scope in C++ or Java, I guess.
But not all of those are unions. The AMA and ABA are, like you said, professional organizations. Doctors get laid off (ask my friend's father), lawyers get laid off (ask ex-lawyers from many tech law firms). The MLBPA and NHLPA, of course, are essentially unions -- they all go on strike every once and a while to get more pay, better benefits. (Thus, please don't call them "professional" organizations -- there's something about tha bastardliness of going on strike for more millions of dollars that doesn't sound "professional.") But doctors and lawyers cannot go on strike. No one negotiates for their higher pay or better benefits.
So, which is it? The union or the professional organization?
Re:Must publically held mean no morals?
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you say that: "managers must do things that will increase shareholder value" and I had said that: "must only do the most profitable thing for their investors." and "make the most money in the quickest time". The first thing I said has to be in complete agreement with what you said, right? So your argument is over the second clause. Well, ultimately stock price has to be the NPV of cash flows right?
Well, one of my points was that profitability != shareholder value (or, increasing profits != increasing shareholder value). Yes, one way to value publicly traded stock is the PV of all future cash flows. But you can value stock also by the PV of all future dividends -- which is, of course, not completely tied to profitability. Or you can value stock by the PV of current earnings + the PV of growth opportunities, using a chosen growth rate and time horizon. (This is how companies like Amazon.com can explain their positive stock prices, no?) Or you can play with all the various financial ratios -- not all directly tied to profits -- out there and multiply/divide to get a share price. Since profits aren't the only thing that matters, it follows that managers can't focus exclusively on making the most money the fastest way possible.
But in the end, yes, you're absolutely right, the forecasting problems added to the immediacy of market forces (in the sense that irrational issues with investor confidence play havoc with the pricing "system") create a managerial incentive to inflate the stock price in the short term. Note that this can be done not just by making your P&L look good, but by various other (sometimes sneaky) tricks. Which proves my ultimate point: inflating stock price to look good is a business decision, not a failure of the premise. Just because the system can be gamed doesn't mean that the system is fundamentally wrong.
Re:Must publically held mean no morals?
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Modern corporate finance (that is, making business decisions based on principles of corporate finance) is based on ONE premise: that managers must do things that will increase shareholder value (i.e., the share price). Not increase profitability, not increase revenue. Increasing the stock price, of course, depends on many, many factors -- including profits, but also including future opportunities (in fact, future opportunities are the most important aspect) and a lot of other tangibles and intangibles. Quickness has nothing to do with it -- any shortcuts to increasing shareholder value will inevitably result in a long-term fall of the same.
This premise (and the difficulty in determining how best to do it) has led to many, um, interpretations of how exactly to achieve it, but they don't change the basic idea. Some of these interpretations, though, can be really poor -- sometimes ill-conceived, sometimes fraudulent. The whole point of this comment? What you're angry about is bad business decisions, not Friedman's (it's not Friedman's, btw, and especially not in the form you give) argument.
It has to IPO because that's almost certainly required in the terms of its VC financing. The IPO is really the whole point of venture capital -- that's where the return on investment for the VCs comes from.
You're absolutely right, of course, especially with the popularity of law and economics and empirical analyses of just about everything. (Although I'm not sure why you'd think that law students don't get training in inductive logic -- reading and discussing cases is often an exercise of just that. And I don't think there's much of a substantive difference between non-legal "paper" research and legal research.) The real value-add of student law review staff is that they scrupulously check the "form" of the argument -- checking mistakes in deductive logic, grammar, and most importantly, whether the author's propositions are correctly supported by their given cites (or whether the propositions need to be supported in the first place).
...because I think that this inattention to detail is simply a human thing -- people everywhere are lazy.
When a law professor submits an article to a law review, it's (with a few exceptions) been peer-reviewed already for substance, but not form. The peer-review process is entirely informal in these cases -- either the prof workshops the article at relevant workshops at different law schools, or he/she posts the article on a peer-review website like NBER. Anyway, if the article is accepted, the very first step of editing involves the staff of the law review sitting down and painstakingly checking every single cite and its proposition (often called a cite check or tech check) to make sure the CITES are correct in form AND in substance. (Usually this is viewed as "grunt" work, but it's certainly not -- as the posted article implies, the cites are one of the most important things about an article!)
As a former law review member, I can tell you that law profs are just as susceptible to lazy behavior as anyone. The main reasons for incorrect cites I think are these: 1) profs read the articles a long time ago, and have been citing them ever since, but have forgotten the subtleties of the articles' arguments but think they still remember; and 2) profs have other profs as friends, and hear about those friends' articles and then cite them because, well, they're friends.
Misciting articles happens all the time. Don't think that peer-review will catch all those kinds of errors -- I'd hope that the science journals have a process for checking the accuracy of cites.
Come on; anyone who grew up with the SMS and NES knew that the NES was the superior platform. Better games, more of them, better graphics and better sound.
Wrong! The reason why I bought the SMS when it came out was because it was technologically better than the NES -- more colors, more memory, more/bigger sprites, etc. The NES was better only because it had so many games for it, and so many good games. But the SMS definitely had better graphics and better sound.
Probably not. A court would probably consider such penalty clauses unenforceable. What you're talking about is a liquidated damages clause; those that are a reasonable estimate of damages are enforceable, but if the clause asks for an "outrageous" sum of money, there's no way it would fly.
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I wasn't saying he deserved his salary; only that you shouldn't talk out of your ass. Whether he deserves his salary is an entirely different issue.
What matters to me is if my AOL stock goes up or down; I would be up in arms if I heard that Case got a raise or was earning a ridiculous amount of money even as I watched my stock price drop. He would certainly not deserve the increase or stability in his salary. But it doesn't look like that's the case -- it was $1 million in 2001, and $1 million in 2000. Thus, I'm up in arms only about the stupidity (or ineptness of the execution) of the AOL-TW merger, which, btw, is certainly enough for me to demand that Case step down.
Look: FUD, even when accompanied by the truth, is still FUD. I'm always against FUD, be it MSFT or Linus or anyone else.
PC's do not have correct color output, and never will.
That's a strange categorical statement. Kind of like, "no one will ever need more than 640K." Is there something magical about Macs' color output?
Try reading the latest AOL SEC filings, or at least look up AOL's profile on yahoo finance. Case's salary in 2001 was $1 million, with no bonus. Annual report season is coming up; you can find out how much he earned last year pretty soon. I doubt it was more than $1 million. Stock option grants were fairly significant when the merger closed, but it doesn't look like he got anything since then, and frankly it wouldn't have mattered, since I think they're all underwater right now -- AOL has been tanking for a while.
Please, just do your homework before posting. Yes, Case is a rich guy -- heading AOL for the past decade has clearly been very, very good to him -- but talking out of your ass makes you sound dumb, drowning out your very good point that the AOL-TW merger was pretty much pointless, and will (has) cost investors many billions of dollars.
This is exactly right. The decision to actually sue is fundamentally a business decision -- it's the business people's job to make that decision with all the info it needs. Lawyers are not there to make business decisions for the business people.
They coach their clients strongly to persue every available legal option by using the tried and true "scare tactic" marketing technique: "If you DON'T sue them, think what the NEXT person might do - you don't want your product to get away from you!".
This is called their ethical duty. Because otherwise, the business person will sue their lawyer for malpractice when one of the "next persons" actually does something bad to them.
I haven't seen Erin Brockovich, but somehow, I still know what contingency means. My above statement stands.
Do you really understand? I don't actually disagree with you and the sentiment that no one works hard enough to earn $60000 per hour. But I don't see how a predetermined percentage of a damages award -- determined, obviously, before knowing what the award was going to be -- is bad. I don't care how much money their fee turned out to be -- the fact is that it was determined beforehand that they'd get whatever percentage if they won, and nothing if they lost. I'm not saying they *deserved* $60000 per hour; I'm saying that that's the gamble they took when they decided to represent the plaintiffs. A very rough analogy: you start a software company that sells a Linux-based OS that truly is a MSFT-killer -- it's the best desktop OS by far, so everyone switches to it, taking the place of MSFT. You went public early on, but in the past 3 years your founder shares have skyrocketed, and suddenly you're worth $60 billion (like I said, your company replaced MSFT) more than the initial value of the shares. Assuming you worked 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, you've earned $2283105 per hour. Is that fair? Should there have been a cap for you? Did you or did you not deserve the capital gain?
My point, of course, is that it doesn't matter at all that you're worth an obscene amount of money. You put in the initial investment, you worked hard to make the company succeeed, but in the end, your worth is *entirely dependent* on the whims of the market. Same with the tobacco lawyers (notwithstanding the fact that the judge reduced substantially the jury award, and the fact that most of the lawyers were Attorneys-General of several states): they agreed with the plaintiffs that they would get X amount of the damages, which were completely at the whim of the jury/judge. Just because it was a windfall doesn't mean it wasn't fair -- that was the gamble, and it paid off.
Another, much less appropriate analogy: you put in $10 on Monday to win the weekly lottery, which was worth, say, $1 million. On Saturday, it turns out that for some reason a lot more than the usual number of participants play that week, so the lottery is for $100 million. Then you win. Should you be forced to give back $99 million, because it "wasn't fair" -- you didn't expect to win that much? That would be ridiculous.
First of all, who's to say they didn't earn it? How do you know how much they deserved? Are you the final arbiter of what everyone should be earning? You probably think there should be caps to salary for everyone, from a janitor to an astronaut, based on someone's (or some committee's) idea of "what's fair."
Second, the lawyers from the outset took a contingency fee -- a percentage of the outcome IF THEY WON. The fact that the jury ended up deciding an outrageously high damages award obviously had no bearing on the initial setting of a percentage of the damages, if any. Haven't you ever seen Erin Brockovich?
However, mandating by law that you need it before you can do it is just a restraint of trade obstacle put up by people who want to limit the competition they have.
That's silly. Of course it's a restraint of trade, but it's a necessary one. Licensing is the best way to make accountability easier.
Look at the legal field, for example. A lot of legal work can easily be done by experienced non-lawyers, but not legally.
Anyone can do their own legal work -- there's nothing that prevents you from doing anything for yourself. The problem is when you are representing to someone else that you are able to do the work *for them.* Sure, some legal work can be done by experienced non-lawyers; there's no question about that. The problem is what happens if those non-lawyers screw up. All lawyers in every jurisdiction need to be licensed, which means a number of things: they have to prove a minimum level of knowledge, they have to prove a minimum level of moral character, and most importantly, they have to register with the people in charge of licensing. That's the most important thing, because if the lawyer screws up, *the appropriate authorities can find him and keep track of him.* Really, that's the essential function of licensure. If you didn't have such requirements, a non-lawyer could do a crappy job, take your money, and run, never to be found again. Most lawyers, however, aren't about to go through the onerous process of getting licensed only to take their first client's money and run -- it would be a waste of 7 years of school, thousands of hours of studying for law school and the bar exam, hundreds of dollars in fees for the application to the bar, and thousands more dollars for malpractice insurance and other fees that are required before being able to actually practice.
The same is true of the medical profession. I'm not interested in non-PhD medical attention, but I don't think that means that some people shouldn't have that option, especially if someone with lesser credentials can treat minor health problems for a lot less money.
You mean "non-MD" medical attention -- PhD's, without MD's, can't practice medicine.
Again, it's not a question of having the OPTION. It's a question of making accountability EASIER.
Instead of mandating certification, I'd be more in favor of a "malpractice" solution. If you claim you can do X and are in the business of doing X and you screw up, then you owe me double damages or something that would provide a strong disincentive for dishonesty or incompetance.
Again, this won't work because it doesn't make accountability any easier. Your scheme would result in a rush of thousands of "doctors" and "lawyers" who take patients/clients, fuck up, and run away with their money.
Interesting. So do you think Microsoft didn't treat its employees very well early on? How would it have survived (read: gotten to where it is now) if it hadn't treated its employees well early on?
Getting "certified" means that the CA Supreme Court -- which, unlike lower courts, has discretion in taking on cases -- has decided it will hear a case. The Court will only rule, however, on the questions of law that it wants to -- the "certified questions." These questions are presented in the application for certification. If it grants certification ("cert"), the court will announce the issues it wants to rule on. Once they do this, the parties can only argue those certified issues.
Here, the 9th Circuit has asked the CA Supreme Court to rule on a particular issue of law, and only that issue. (Appellants can certify questions, too, but here a federal court has decided that the federal court system isn't the appropriate place to decide what sounds like a novel state law question.) If it decides to grant cert, the CA S.Ct. can decide to take the formulation of the 9th Cir's question, or reformulate it, but it will rule only on the formulation of the question it decides on.
What I'm saying is that it's *not* different. There are no laws limiting the number of people being sued OR the number of people suing in a particular suit, as long as the issues are the same or nearly the same (this brings in issues with joinder and pendent or supplemental jurisdiction, but it's still all about personal jurisdiction). There's no good interest to be served for passing a law like that, and would possibly be unconstitutional anyway. The only issue (wrt to the number of parties, aside from standing issues) is whether the court has power over the parties (personal jurisdiction). It just doesn't matter that 500 people/corporations want to sue 1 person/corporation, 500 people/corporations want to sue 1 person/corporation, or even 500 people/corporations want to sue 500 other people/corporations.
The earlier post to which I'd responded said that there would/should be a difference between 500 people suing a corporation and one corporation suing suing 500 people. Clearly, there's no problem with that -- one person could certainly sue 500 corporations, no? The number is irrelevant.
What state do you would have a different outcome? AFAIK, all states require that the secret holder take resonable precaustions to protect their secret. If you lawfully obtain the secret without signing an NDA, you are legally allowed to disclose it.
I actually didn't mean to say KFC here; I'm sorry. I only meant that there have been several cases in several states in which owners of trade secrets whose secrets were otherwise essentially not secret -- but were treating the knowledge as secret anyway -- were able to sue successfully parties who obtained and disclosed the knowledge unauthorized. It's just one of those weird things.
The KFC case *is* different. The house buyers accidentally came across the secret recipe. In this case, there was already a lot of legal brouhaha over the publication of the code for deCSS; the plaintiffs in the case knew this, and republished anyway. (In fact, the plaintiffs use that argument to defend themselves: that the fact that the code was already published rendered the information public and thus not secret.) The difference is that there was no misappropriation to speak of in the KFC situation, but there may have been in the deCSS case.
You're absolutely right though: the defendants can make a very credible argument against being subject to violating trade secret laws. All I'm saying is that trade secret laws sometimes lead to screwy results, and that they definitely have the weakest jurisprudential basis of any form of IP on which to make easy predictions.
It certainly depends on the state trade secret laws, because the same situation would result in KFC winning in several states. At any rate, I'm sure you can see how the Col. Sanders case is a bit different. The issue there isn't so much whether the disclosure was unauthorized, but whether there was disclosure at all. Say, for example, someone serendipitously stumbles upon the KFC recipe (just like finding it in your attic) and then publishes it. There's no disclosure, much less unauthorized disclosure, so KFC can't sue under trade secret law.
If it was treated as a trade secret, and the disclosure was unauthorized, the owner of the secret can certainly sue the disclosers even if it's no longer a secret.
Here's the funny thing (and I think you were thinking about this situation): say, for example, Coca-Cola disclosed to Cadbury-Schweppes, RC Cola, and every rum manufacturer in the western hemisphere the secret formula to Coke, under NDA. A disgruntled Coca-Cola employee then without authorization discloses the formula to Pepsi, which uses it to make "Pepsi II." Coca-Cola can sue Pepsi (and the disgruntled employee) under trade secret law (depending on the state, since trade secret laws are state laws), *even though it's not really a secret after all the other disclosures.* Now, it depends on the state, but Coca-Cola would win this situation in at least a few states.
So they want permission to able to do a sort of "reverse class-action", where they're allowed to sue everyone at once.
This has nothing to do with getting permission to sue a lot of people at the same time. The law gives a powerful incentive for a plaintiff in a certain matter to sue *everyone* that he thinks might be at fault at the time of the suit, because after the judgment is final, the plaintiff might be barred from suing anyone else wrt the same issues. Collateral estoppel (or, as it's called now, issue preclusion) is principally a judicial economy concept that's been around for quite a while.
The other thing to think about is that there's no fundamental difference between a corporation wanting to sue 500 people and a person wanting to sue 500 corporations (aside from cost and the fact that there are more people than corporations). Both people AND corporations -- litigants -- have had the ability to sue 500 of anything for a very long time. If you think, oh, but a corporation is evil blah blah blah, well, you may be right, but the courts can't and won't assume something like that.
This case is about personal jurisdiction -- whether a court has power over certain litigants to hear and decide issues between them. It's an extremely important case, but it's certainly not about whether one can sue lots of people at once. The problem for the RIAA/MPAA is that because the defendants are all over the world, it's hard to say that the court in Santa Clara County, CA has the power to hale them all in and make final judgments over all of them. If the court rules against them about this issue, then the RIAA/MPAA has to sue the defendants in the courts that actually have power over them. But if, for example, all 500 defendants lived in CA, *there wouldn't be a question at ALL.*
Hm. As far as I can tell, the GPL uses the same definition of "derivative work" as in copyright law. See section 0: ... "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language."
..." is a modifying clause or a descriptive clause, and a court would definitely look into that issue, but I think RMS definitely intended that "derivative work" mean the same as in copyright law. In fact, since he doesn't use the legal convention of capitalizing defined terms for "derivative work" (as he does for "Program"), I think a court would certainly apply the copyright law definition.
Compare to section 101 of the copyright act: "A ''derivative work'' is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as [examples] or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ''derivative work''."
One might argue about whether the GPL's clause "that is,
Granted, the meaning of "derivative work" has been highly contested over the years. To answer your other question, the meaning of "derivative work" for purposes of applying general copyright law to, say, the enforceability of the GPL, or specific situations that the GPL doesn't cover (this is called "gap-filling") will *always* be the meaning from copyright law. The only time "derivative work" as defined in the GPL (assuming, for now, it's actually different) would take precedence over the meaning in copyright law is in each instance that the GPL itself uses "derivative work" AND clearly uses it as a defined term RATHER than the general term. Very roughly like variable scope in C++ or Java, I guess.
But not all of those are unions. The AMA and ABA are, like you said, professional organizations. Doctors get laid off (ask my friend's father), lawyers get laid off (ask ex-lawyers from many tech law firms). The MLBPA and NHLPA, of course, are essentially unions -- they all go on strike every once and a while to get more pay, better benefits. (Thus, please don't call them "professional" organizations -- there's something about tha bastardliness of going on strike for more millions of dollars that doesn't sound "professional.") But doctors and lawyers cannot go on strike. No one negotiates for their higher pay or better benefits.
So, which is it? The union or the professional organization?
you say that: "managers must do things that will increase shareholder value" and I had said that: "must only do the most profitable thing for their investors." and "make the most money in the quickest time". The first thing I said has to be in complete agreement with what you said, right? So your argument is over the second clause. Well, ultimately stock price has to be the NPV of cash flows right?
Well, one of my points was that profitability != shareholder value (or, increasing profits != increasing shareholder value). Yes, one way to value publicly traded stock is the PV of all future cash flows. But you can value stock also by the PV of all future dividends -- which is, of course, not completely tied to profitability. Or you can value stock by the PV of current earnings + the PV of growth opportunities, using a chosen growth rate and time horizon. (This is how companies like Amazon.com can explain their positive stock prices, no?) Or you can play with all the various financial ratios -- not all directly tied to profits -- out there and multiply/divide to get a share price. Since profits aren't the only thing that matters, it follows that managers can't focus exclusively on making the most money the fastest way possible.
But in the end, yes, you're absolutely right, the forecasting problems added to the immediacy of market forces (in the sense that irrational issues with investor confidence play havoc with the pricing "system") create a managerial incentive to inflate the stock price in the short term. Note that this can be done not just by making your P&L look good, but by various other (sometimes sneaky) tricks. Which proves my ultimate point: inflating stock price to look good is a business decision, not a failure of the premise. Just because the system can be gamed doesn't mean that the system is fundamentally wrong.
Modern corporate finance (that is, making business decisions based on principles of corporate finance) is based on ONE premise: that managers must do things that will increase shareholder value (i.e., the share price). Not increase profitability, not increase revenue. Increasing the stock price, of course, depends on many, many factors -- including profits, but also including future opportunities (in fact, future opportunities are the most important aspect) and a lot of other tangibles and intangibles. Quickness has nothing to do with it -- any shortcuts to increasing shareholder value will inevitably result in a long-term fall of the same.
This premise (and the difficulty in determining how best to do it) has led to many, um, interpretations of how exactly to achieve it, but they don't change the basic idea. Some of these interpretations, though, can be really poor -- sometimes ill-conceived, sometimes fraudulent. The whole point of this comment? What you're angry about is bad business decisions, not Friedman's (it's not Friedman's, btw, and especially not in the form you give) argument.
It has to IPO because that's almost certainly required in the terms of its VC financing. The IPO is really the whole point of venture capital -- that's where the return on investment for the VCs comes from.
You're absolutely right, of course, especially with the popularity of law and economics and empirical analyses of just about everything. (Although I'm not sure why you'd think that law students don't get training in inductive logic -- reading and discussing cases is often an exercise of just that. And I don't think there's much of a substantive difference between non-legal "paper" research and legal research.) The
real value-add of student law review staff is that they scrupulously check the "form" of the argument -- checking mistakes in deductive logic, grammar, and most importantly, whether the author's propositions are correctly supported by their given cites (or whether the propositions need to be supported in the first place).
...because I think that this inattention to detail is simply a human thing -- people everywhere are lazy.
When a law professor submits an article to a law review, it's (with a few exceptions) been peer-reviewed already for substance, but not form. The peer-review process is entirely informal in these cases -- either the prof workshops the article at relevant workshops at different law schools, or he/she posts the article on a peer-review website like NBER. Anyway, if the article is accepted, the very first step of editing involves the staff of the law review sitting down and painstakingly checking every single cite and its proposition (often called a cite check or tech check) to make sure the CITES are correct in form AND in substance. (Usually this is viewed as "grunt" work, but it's certainly not -- as the posted article implies, the cites are one of the most important things about an article!)
As a former law review member, I can tell you that law profs are just as susceptible to lazy behavior as anyone. The main reasons for incorrect cites I think are these: 1) profs read the articles a long time ago, and have been citing them ever since, but have forgotten the subtleties of the articles' arguments but think they still remember; and 2) profs have other profs as friends, and hear about those friends' articles and then cite them because, well, they're friends.
Misciting articles happens all the time. Don't think that peer-review will catch all those kinds of errors -- I'd hope that the science journals have a process for checking the accuracy of cites.
Come on; anyone who grew up with the SMS and NES knew that the NES was the superior platform. Better games, more of them, better graphics and better sound.
Wrong! The reason why I bought the SMS when it came out was because it was technologically better than the NES -- more colors, more memory, more/bigger sprites, etc. The NES was better only because it had so many games for it, and so many good games. But the SMS definitely had better graphics and better sound.
Probably not. A court would probably consider such penalty clauses unenforceable. What you're talking about is a liquidated damages clause; those that are a reasonable estimate of damages are enforceable, but if the clause asks for an "outrageous" sum of money, there's no way it would fly.
SSH/port 22 was open during the past summer. 21 might have been; I'm not sure, since I always SSH.