That's right, it's not really a person. It's all based on a pun, the fact that they used to be called "corporate persons", and since that's the same word used in the 14th Amendment (though not the same sense of the word), it was argued that corporations should have equal protection under the laws as actual persons. A really bad pun is what caused all this mess.
Fun Fact: The 14th Amendment language regarding "persons" was applied to corporations (not people) before it was applied to women (people) and homosexuals (people).
Interesting. Wrong, though. It was generally held that corporations should have broadly the same rights and responsibilities as people long before the 14th amendment was ratified. See (for example) Louisville, C. & C.R. Co. v. Letson, 2 How. 497, 558, 11 L.Ed. 353 (1844).
So in this case the bank wanted to temporarily silence it critic whilst it own public relations and marketing teams created a lie to cover it over and via mass media define their lie as the truth and the accusations against them and their corrupt clients as lies.
In this case, I think they're fighting a losing battle. I mean, seriously... who's going to believe that an offshore bank isn't involved in helping its clients evade tax?
Putting aside the serious deficiencies with flash, hiring quality people to work with it was nearly impossible.
That's because you can't put aside the serious deficiencies with it, and working with it for complicated applications is nearly impossible. Seriously. My company did a good trade in about 2002 - 2004 converting Flash web sites to HTML/javascript when their owners realised how expensive maintenance was going to be.
Did you know that a lot of them had flash interfaces because Macromedia had subsidised the initial development?
Copyright applies to an expression of an idea, not the idea itself. Scrabble is not an expression.
The image of the board can be copyrighted. The manual can be copyrighted. The logo can be trademarked. But the rules of the game are not subject to copyright.
The arrangement of bonus squares could be subject to copyright. Also (although with somewhat less certainty) the selection of available letters could be subject to copyright. Change these, and you'll end up with a game that is somewhat like Scrabble, but which isn't Scrabble and which isn't subject to copyright. As it is, these two aspects of the game seem likely to me to be copyrightable.
There's a lot more to it than where you're incorporated.
If you do business in Italy, you can be sued there.
That's not actually true. The general standard is that a company can be sued in a country in which it has a "permanent establishment", which normally translates to an office or an employed agent. It's the same rule that determines whether they have to pay tax there or not.
In America, yes; the truth is not, however, a defense on its own in all countries.
Wikimedia, however, is a US company, operating only within the US, and therefore only has to comply with US laws.
Individual Wikipedia contributors may or may not be liable, depending on local laws in their own jurisdictions, but I see no grounds on which anyone could sue Wikimedia under any national law other than US.
On the other hand, the UK's libel laws are completely unreasonable, as the "McLibel Case demonstrates. The European Court of Human Rights found that the two defendents' right to a fair trial and right to the freedom of expression had been violated.
Note that the laws the ECHR found had been violated in the trial are part of UK law, so it is not so much that the UK libel law is unreasonable, as the courts in this case applied the laws incorrectly. The fault is that of the court, not of the law, and I understand that as a result of this case the courts are generally more careful of the right to free expression than they were before. Additionally, legal aid is now available for libel cases (thus the right to fair trial is no longer an issue), and already was by the time the ECHR published their verdict in this case.
You're looking at a case where UK law was misapplied, not one that shows it to be inadequate.
But what is wrong with this picture (from one of the Wikipedia links above)? Is she some sort or slave woman whose chains were photoshopped from her legs but not all of her shadow? WTF?
Does look like it. See also pictures of same model in these locations:
Imagine the little record label suing Sony for re-listing their catelog without permission, and Sony simply out-spends them, then forces them out of business by having them pay for the legal costs?
Funnily enough, you don't hear about this happening very often in the UK, which has a loser-normally-pays system (rather than loser occasionally pays, as in the US). Now this could be because UK law has a substantially different culture to the US (although I'm far from convinced that this is true) or it could be because the threat is blown up out of all proportion by those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Here's a suggestion: google tort reform astroturf. I highly recommend the first link that comes up, and some of the others are good too.
Art existed long before copyright did -- but was paid for by a sponsoring patron.
The patronage system worked pretty well in aristocratic rennaisance Europe, due to the reasonably large number of incredibly wealthy families whose members frequently had nothing else to do with their time, the important work of managing their estates having been contracted out to people trained for the job.
Even then, though, it was harder for middle-tier artists to make a living than it is now. There is today a huge difference in the volume of new work published compared to then, and most of this is due to the commercialisation of art.
I'm not saying patronage is useless, but I am saying it's unlikely to work as well now as it did at the time, and it doesn't promote the wide diversity of art that we're used to these days.
6 million. Or, to put it another way, enough people that only a tiny fraction of them need to change their vote at the next election because of it and our beloved government is in serious trouble.
If your implementation is buggy, does that mean you're not covered?
That is my primary concern with the entire promise. None of this bullshit not-tested-in-court crap that came up the other day: it doesn't cover implementations with slight variations in functionality.
This, it seems, is intentional. MS don't want to allow others to embrace & extend their standards.
I'd assume it has something to do with the antitrust action the EU was taking. Didn't they order that Microsoft had to open all their protocols/formats?
As far as I remember, they only insisted on protocols (it was on the basis of a complaint from server OS vendors that MS was tying their market-leading desktop OSs to their server OSs and gaining an unfair advantage).
Fair enough. However, the original poster was clearly thinking about the many regions of the USA where only one broadband provider is able to offer any service at all.
When the only disincentive to breaking the law is a minor financial slap on the wrist and the potential benefits are so great, who thinks any of the companies involved in this will have the integrity to resist?
Actually, the disincentives are substantially more than minor financial slaps on the wrist. Knowingly disclosing private information to an unauthorised third party is a criminal offence, and the directors of any companies involved could be prosecuted personally.
Is this the type of "opt-in" used in a lot of AOL's software (damn you AIM)? Wherein, during the install of the latest and "greatest", you are presented with the "recommended" install package (which essentially hijacks your computer with crap third party software) or the custom install where you have to specifically uncheck all those options (checked by default).
No. As I understand the situation, the EU data protection laws require you to take some clear action to opt in. Boxes checked by default are opt-out, and as such not adequate to authorize data sharing.
Under the terms of the law an organization may not share personal data to another party without your consent. It's a pretty decent law, I don't know how the hell it got passed.
You can't take a copy of my website, insert a little bit, and then serve that. Couldn't google sue any ISP that alters their pages in any way?
It depends on the process used. If no additional copy is made (e.g. if the packet stream is manipulated directly), I can't see that copyright law is even relevant.
DSL competition is a fucking joke in the UK. Almost all the DSL services you can buy are still over BT's hardware, and BT charge other ISPs by the byte transferred.
I'm not sure what your information source on this is, but AFAICT it is simply not true. See here for pricing information for BT IPStream as of November 2006. Unless this charge is new, there is no per-byte charge.
Presumably there's an alternative to Google search. Not so for some regional ISPs, where it's either them or dial-up.
This is simply not the case in the UK. Anywhere you can get service from any of these 3 big names, there are tens of other ISPs who can provide a service as good (if not actually better).
Look, if it was a good spec then there would be reason to debate it's license, implied or otherwise. There would be reason to discuss Microsofts standing.
It isn't a good spec, so it isn't relevant. The same license also applies to a number of other specs that MS have participated in, including SOAP, WSDL, the VHD image format, SPF, and WMF, all of which are important standards that are relevant to open source implementers. Yes, it's worth discussing.
and such a document - being neither a release nor a contract - has never been tested in court Bullshit. It's a promise not to take legal action. It says so in the first sentence:
Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for... Such promises have been tested in court many times. The doctrine that enforces them is called Promissory Estoppel.
Promissory estoppel requires:-
* (i) an unequivocal promise by words or conduct,
* (ii) evidence that there is a change in position of the promisee as a result of the promise (reliance but not necessarily to their detriment),
* (iii) inequity if the promisor were to go back on the promise. Microsoft's words are clearly unequivocal. There is clearly a change in position on the part of a developer who, having read Microsoft's promise, decides to incorporate this format into their software. It would clearly be inequitable then for Microsoft to take action against them.
Untested in court my ass. The first case to use it was 131 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
That's right, it's not really a person. It's all based on a pun, the fact that they used to be called "corporate persons", and since that's the same word used in the 14th Amendment (though not the same sense of the word), it was argued that corporations should have equal protection under the laws as actual persons. A really bad pun is what caused all this mess.
Fun Fact: The 14th Amendment language regarding "persons" was applied to corporations (not people) before it was applied to women (people) and homosexuals (people).
Interesting. Wrong, though. It was generally held that corporations should have broadly the same rights and responsibilities as people long before the 14th amendment was ratified. See (for example) Louisville, C. & C.R. Co. v. Letson, 2 How. 497, 558, 11 L.Ed. 353 (1844).
So in this case the bank wanted to temporarily silence it critic whilst it own public relations and marketing teams created a lie to cover it over and via mass media define their lie as the truth and the accusations against them and their corrupt clients as lies.
In this case, I think they're fighting a losing battle. I mean, seriously... who's going to believe that an offshore bank isn't involved in helping its clients evade tax?
Putting aside the serious deficiencies with flash, hiring quality people to work with it was nearly impossible.
That's because you can't put aside the serious deficiencies with it, and working with it for complicated applications is nearly impossible. Seriously. My company did a good trade in about 2002 - 2004 converting Flash web sites to HTML/javascript when their owners realised how expensive maintenance was going to be.
Did you know that a lot of them had flash interfaces because Macromedia had subsidised the initial development?
Copyright applies to an expression of an idea, not the idea itself. Scrabble is not an expression.
The image of the board can be copyrighted. The manual can be copyrighted. The logo can be trademarked. But the rules of the game are not subject to copyright.
The arrangement of bonus squares could be subject to copyright. Also (although with somewhat less certainty) the selection of available letters could be subject to copyright. Change these, and you'll end up with a game that is somewhat like Scrabble, but which isn't Scrabble and which isn't subject to copyright. As it is, these two aspects of the game seem likely to me to be copyrightable.
There's a lot more to it than where you're incorporated.
If you do business in Italy, you can be sued there.
That's not actually true. The general standard is that a company can be sued in a country in which it has a "permanent establishment", which normally translates to an office or an employed agent. It's the same rule that determines whether they have to pay tax there or not.
Barbara Bauer, described by SFWA as one of the twenty worst literary agents they know of, and who has a history of threatening people who are critical of her and getting ISPs to shut down web sites that are critical of her and claiming her name is her intellectual property and cannot be published without her permission, sued Wikimedia (among others) for repeating some of the above claims about a year ago. But I've heard nothing about the case since. Can anyone comment?
In America, yes; the truth is not, however, a defense on its own in all countries.
Wikimedia, however, is a US company, operating only within the US, and therefore only has to comply with US laws.
Individual Wikipedia contributors may or may not be liable, depending on local laws in their own jurisdictions, but I see no grounds on which anyone could sue Wikimedia under any national law other than US.
On the other hand, the UK's libel laws are completely unreasonable, as the "McLibel Case demonstrates. The European Court of Human Rights found that the two defendents' right to a fair trial and right to the freedom of expression had been violated.
Note that the laws the ECHR found had been violated in the trial are part of UK law, so it is not so much that the UK libel law is unreasonable, as the courts in this case applied the laws incorrectly. The fault is that of the court, not of the law, and I understand that as a result of this case the courts are generally more careful of the right to free expression than they were before. Additionally, legal aid is now available for libel cases (thus the right to fair trial is no longer an issue), and already was by the time the ECHR published their verdict in this case.
You're looking at a case where UK law was misapplied, not one that shows it to be inadequate.
But what is wrong with this picture (from one of the Wikipedia links above)? Is she some sort or slave woman whose chains were photoshopped from her legs but not all of her shadow? WTF?
Does look like it. See also pictures of same model in these locations:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jassi_in_Hand-_und_Fu%C3%9Fschellen.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Rubberclothing_(Latex)_-_models_Jassi_and_Dana.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Ringknebel_Jassi_(ringgag_bondage)-cropped.JPG
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Leather-straitjacket_-_model_Jassi.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Bondage_(Knebel)_Model_Jassi.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Fetters_-_leg_irons_-_photomodel_Jassi.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Strappado_-_Model_Jassi.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Bondage_(Hogtie)_Model_Jassi.jpg
Imagine the little record label suing Sony for re-listing their catelog without permission, and Sony simply out-spends them, then forces them out of business by having them pay for the legal costs?
Funnily enough, you don't hear about this happening very often in the UK, which has a loser-normally-pays system (rather than loser occasionally pays, as in the US). Now this could be because UK law has a substantially different culture to the US (although I'm far from convinced that this is true) or it could be because the threat is blown up out of all proportion by those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Here's a suggestion: google tort reform astroturf. I highly recommend the first link that comes up, and some of the others are good too.
Art existed long before copyright did -- but was paid for by a sponsoring patron.
The patronage system worked pretty well in aristocratic rennaisance Europe, due to the reasonably large number of incredibly wealthy families whose members frequently had nothing else to do with their time, the important work of managing their estates having been contracted out to people trained for the job.
Even then, though, it was harder for middle-tier artists to make a living than it is now. There is today a huge difference in the volume of new work published compared to then, and most of this is due to the commercialisation of art.
I'm not saying patronage is useless, but I am saying it's unlikely to work as well now as it did at the time, and it doesn't promote the wide diversity of art that we're used to these days.
6 million. Or, to put it another way, enough people that only a tiny fraction of them need to change their vote at the next election because of it and our beloved government is in serious trouble.
Actually, I think it's part of google's master plan.
If your implementation is buggy, does that mean you're not covered?
That is my primary concern with the entire promise. None of this bullshit not-tested-in-court crap that came up the other day: it doesn't cover implementations with slight variations in functionality.
This, it seems, is intentional. MS don't want to allow others to embrace & extend their standards.
I'd assume it has something to do with the antitrust action the EU was taking. Didn't they order that Microsoft had to open all their protocols/formats?
As far as I remember, they only insisted on protocols (it was on the basis of a complaint from server OS vendors that MS was tying their market-leading desktop OSs to their server OSs and gaining an unfair advantage).
Fair enough. However, the original poster was clearly thinking about the many regions of the USA where only one broadband provider is able to offer any service at all.
When the only disincentive to breaking the law is a minor financial slap on the wrist and the potential benefits are so great, who thinks any of the companies involved in this will have the integrity to resist?
Actually, the disincentives are substantially more than minor financial slaps on the wrist. Knowingly disclosing private information to an unauthorised third party is a criminal offence, and the directors of any companies involved could be prosecuted personally.
Is this the type of "opt-in" used in a lot of AOL's software (damn you AIM)? Wherein, during the install of the latest and "greatest", you are presented with the "recommended" install package (which essentially hijacks your computer with crap third party software) or the custom install where you have to specifically uncheck all those options (checked by default).
No. As I understand the situation, the EU data protection laws require you to take some clear action to opt in. Boxes checked by default are opt-out, and as such not adequate to authorize data sharing.
Under the terms of the law an organization may not share personal data to another party without your consent. It's a pretty decent law, I don't know how the hell it got passed.
By EU directive.
Wouldn't copyright law already cover that?
You can't take a copy of my website, insert a little bit, and then serve that. Couldn't google sue any ISP that alters their pages in any way?
It depends on the process used. If no additional copy is made (e.g. if the packet stream is manipulated directly), I can't see that copyright law is even relevant.
DSL competition is a fucking joke in the UK. Almost all the DSL services you can buy are still over BT's hardware, and BT charge other ISPs by the byte transferred.
I'm not sure what your information source on this is, but AFAICT it is simply not true. See here for pricing information for BT IPStream as of November 2006. Unless this charge is new, there is no per-byte charge.
Presumably there's an alternative to Google search. Not so for some regional ISPs, where it's either them or dial-up.
This is simply not the case in the UK. Anywhere you can get service from any of these 3 big names, there are tens of other ISPs who can provide a service as good (if not actually better).
It isn't a good spec, so it isn't relevant. The same license also applies to a number of other specs that MS have participated in, including SOAP, WSDL, the VHD image format, SPF, and WMF, all of which are important standards that are relevant to open source implementers. Yes, it's worth discussing.
* (i) an unequivocal promise by words or conduct,
* (ii) evidence that there is a change in position of the promisee as a result of the promise (reliance but not necessarily to their detriment),
* (iii) inequity if the promisor were to go back on the promise. Microsoft's words are clearly unequivocal. There is clearly a change in position on the part of a developer who, having read Microsoft's promise, decides to incorporate this format into their software. It would clearly be inequitable then for Microsoft to take action against them.
Untested in court my ass. The first case to use it was 131 years ago.