once it was archived, she could have just contacted archive.org. I am fairly certain they have a process by which the author or owner of a domain can request that their already-archived content be removed.
She did, and they did remove her site. The problem, as far as she's concerned, is that according to the terms of her so-called contract, Internet Archive now owe her several hundred thousand dollars for the privelege of having copied her site.
No robots.txt... how should a crawler read this information?
Even *with* a robots.txt, how should a crawler read the information? Robots.txt files are advisory, not legally mandated, and should remain such. How can they inform a non-sentient computer program of the terms and conditions attached to its accessing a web site in such a way that allows it to make an informed decision about whether or not to access that site? Because that would be necessary, legally speaking, for a contract to be formed.
that is a bit of a cop out. i shouldnt have to be a lawyer to be able to have rights. if it was her intent was clear, and i think it was, she should win. if everypage said 'do not copy' that is that same as putting a 'no tresspassing' sign every 300 feet.
No, it isn't. Trespassing is a law that is somewhat unequivocable: if you remain on somebody else's property after being told to leave (perhaps via such a notice), you are breaking it. While there is a law that can prevent you copying stuff, it has a number of exceptions, which are generally called "fair use". Internet Archive rely on fair use arguments to support the legality of their project. I think they're right. If I tell you not to copy this post, it doesn't mean shit. You can copy it, as long as your use is "fair", legally speaking, whether I want you to or not.
I wonder if duress (compelling the user to agree regardless of their wishes) is grounds for a lawsuit by itself, or if you have to wait until the contract you entered under duress causes some damage to you.
It automatically invalidates the contract, and entitles you to behave as if the contract does not exist. I believe you could get a court to declare the contract void, but it would just be a formality.
IANAL, etc. The above isn't legal advice, whatever it may look like.
While I agree with you in principle, the law suggests that she did post the notice correctly, since (from what I gathered FTFA) the law doesn't make any distinctions between a human eyeball and a robot eyeball....attorney John Ottaviani,..., says the issue is "whether there was 'an adequate notice of the existence of the terms' and a 'meaningful opportunity to review' the terms."
A "meaningful opportunity to review the terms" would (I think) necessarily include somebody sentient agreeing that the terms were reasonable.
The entire UCITA business is a red herring, IMO. That just asserts that if you program a computer to enter into contracts, it is automatically authorised to enter into them on your behalf, even if sometimes it doesn't do it in quite the way you intended. You made the rules it follows, live with them. I think this is a reasonable law.
The case here is different: Internet Archive never intended their spider to form legal contracts. Hence, at least by my understanding of contract law (I'm not a lawyer, but I seem to understand the subject somewhat better than my former law student housemate did) it cannot possibly form a contract. To form a contract, you have to intend to form one. I don't know of any exception to this rule.
Idiot for a lawyer and an idiot for a client. It's not going to go well for her, is it?
I mean, just how did she figure she'd get away with charges for "civil theft" (generally defined as "taking property with the intent of permanently depriving its rightful owner of its use") or "conversion" (which also relates to taking property) when no property was taken? And RICO without a racket?
The contract claim will clearly fail -- reading between the lines of the document you link, it was essentially only not struck out at this stage because the court wasn't allowed to consider the evidence presented by Internet Archive that they hadn't seen the notice of the contract.
That leaves only the copyright claim, and I think it's pretty clear that Internet Archive's use is fair use.
She might have a copyright claim, but she couldn't even get that one up the steps. Did she even file for infringement?
Yes. See the link in the sibling post of yours to a case summary.
Shell, proceeding pro se, counterclaimed, asserting that Internet Archive's copying of her site gave rise to claims of copyright infringement, conversion, civil theft and RICO. Shell also asserted that the Internet Archive's activities breached the contract formed between the parties as a result of plaintiff's act of copying portions of defendant's site, which act purportedly constituted an acceptance of the site's terms and conditions of use. [...] Internet Archive moved to dismiss all of Shell's claims save for those of copyright infringement. The court denied so much of Internet Archive's motion that sought dismissal of Shell's breach of contract claims.
So there are two outstanding claims: one for copyright infringement and one for breach of contract. TFA is wrong, presumably because it took the list of claims from IA's motion to dismiss, and didn't realise they weren't moving to dismiss all the claims.
...you agree not to mod me down for being First Post!
- RG>
Which is a perfect illustration of the point here. By reading your post I made no such agreement, because I didn't understand before reading it that such agreement would be made. In order to form a contract, both parties involved in the contract must intend to form one. Contracts don't come into existence arbitrarily. You can't accidentally enter into a contract. This is well known legal theory.
In a post on law professor Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law blog, attorney John Ottaviani, a partner at Edwards & Angell in Providence, R.I., says the issue is "whether there was 'an adequate notice of the existence of the terms' and a 'meaningful opportunity to review' the terms."
Which I find it hard to believe the motion for summary dismissal didn't decide never existed. Hopefully the actual trial court will take one look at this supposed contract and laugh.
Generally though, if someone really wants a naked pc, they are probably capable of building it from parts.
Capable, yes. Able to justify it to their employer in a commercial environment? Probably not. It would go something like this:
"You want to do what?" "Instead of buying these PCs from Dell, which come with a copy of Windows we don't need, I want to buy parts and assemble them into computers myself." "How much money do we save?" "About fifty dollars per machine." "How long will this take?" "Including testing, about half an hour per machine." "OK. What about warranties?" "All the parts will be warrantied for one year." "The parts. Not the computers." "Yes." "So when one breaks, instead of returning the entire machine for service, you have to diagnose which part is faulty before we can return it." "Yes." "How long will that take?" "About half an hour per incident." "How much am I paying you?" "Forty dollars per hour." "If we ever decided to install Windows, how much would it cost to get copies to replace the ones we'll not be buying" "About a hundred dollars each." "Go call Dell."
Looking at the technical problems such as radiation protection (Mars has no magnetic field to deflect particles btw)
Radiation reaching the Martian surface is apparently about 2.5 times exposure in low Earth orbit. NASA describe it as high but within manageable limits, and I'm sure they understand the consequences of it better than I do.
Not meaning to spoil your joke or anything, but you do know that the large, visible ice caps at the martian poles are dry ice, right? The water ice is beneath those caps.
Mars' atmosphere a surface pressure 1% (from memory) of the Earths. If we 'release' the frozen ice, won't a whole heap of water simply 'evaporate' into space?
It will immediately boil, yes, but I don't think it will reach the velocity required to escape into space. As I understand it, it would stay in the atmosphere until it is guided by the prevailing winds to either the north or south pole, at which point it will cool enough to freeze onto one of the existing ice deposits there.
Here's a hint: multiply 1370 W/m^2 minus 590 W/m2 by the cross sectional area of mars (around 3.6 x 10^13 m^2) to give you 2.7 x 10^16 Watts.
From the source you cite: The average solar intensity at the orbit of Mars is 590 W/m2, compared with 1370 W/m2 in Earth orbit
The figures you're citing are orbital figures. Most of that energy is reflected off or absorbed by the atmosphere. Energy reaching the surface of the Earth is more like 200 W/m2, with an additional 70W/m2 absorbed by the atmosphere. I don't know about the Martian surface, I haven't found any sources, but with a thinner atmosphere, I dare say a higher proportion of that energy reaches it. I'd guess you're probably looking at making up a deficit of less than 100W/m2, not 600.
Yes, I'm aware of that. I wrote a significant proportion of that article. However, I still contend that most CS undergrads don't need to know what a spinlock is; they're too low level to be useful in most situations.
From the article:Here at De Montfort I run an ICT degree, which does not assume that programming is an essential skill. The degree focuses on delivering IT services in organisations, on taking a holistic view of computing in organisations, and on holistic thinking.
ie. not Computer Science. For those not familiar with the UK education set up I should also explain that De Montfort University is the old Leicester Polytechnic. The Polys were set up to provide much more practical education than the theoretical stances of the Universities, and a damned good job many did of it too - I'm certainly not playing the one-upmanship card that some do about the old polys, Leicester Poly was a good place and its successor De Montford has reached even further.
But the point stands - this point of view is coming from an academic teaching at a more practically-oriented institution and already running a non-science based course. His viewpoint should be considered against that background.
Exactly. And I don't think his experience of falling student numbers applies across-the-board. My old university is an excellent example: one of the top 10 UK universities for CS. When I graduated (more than a few years ago), the CS department had a small building: two storeys, roughly square, about 10 metres a side. A few years ago it was moved to a new building. Three storeys, about 20 metres a side. I.e., about six times as large. You can't tell me that student numbers have been declining there.
Where does this 25-years old millionaire work? Is he doing programming or management?
Based on the people I've seen achieve this sort of thing, he's almost certainly doing both, probably management about 4 hours per day and actual development work 8-12 hours. You don't make millions by being just a manager. You have to start out on your own, or in a small team, and you have to pull your weight in terms of doing the real work, alongside the management issues of keeping your business running smoothly as it expands.
Spare me the MIT holier-than-thou bit. Maybe when more than half your undergrads can explain the difference between a spinlock and a semaphore we'll listen.
Why would an average CS undergrad even need to know what a spinlock is? Seriously: spinlocks are specialist tools that are used by system implementors to produce higher level constructs like semaphores, mutexes and monitors. You only need to know about them if you specialise in concurrency.
I'm not convinced that scheme is a better language for teaching algorithm design than Java is. Yes, it has some nice aspects, particularly in that it can be used in a pure functional style, but I honestly don't see any particular benefit it has over Java for teaching undergraduate level data structure & algorithm courses.
Like one of the other posters, I went to a nearly-top-tier UK university (in my case, Warwick), but I'm a little too old to have caught the university Java trend (Java itself had its first public release during my first year; the university switched to Java for its programming courses the year after I graduated), but we did "intro to data structures & algorithms" in Pascal, which worked out OK. I think Java's a better language than Pascal for this because students feel like they're working with a useful language (we all universally hated Pascal; we were forced to program in ISO-standard Pascal, which is the most horrible programming environment I've ever worked with).
We also had separate courses on functional programming (in my year we used Miranda, but subsequent years used ML I believe) and declarative programming (SWI Prolog). We didn't build a CPU (although I believe students on the slight alternative course Computer Systems Engineering may have), but we did work on low-level projects (programming a small robot with light sensors to follow a line in 68000 assembly, and there was a project in NS32000, although I don't recall what it did).
I think choice of language is much less important than the choice of what the lecturers emphasize in the course. And especially, choice of projects. Want the students to learn about memory allocation? Have them implement a memory allocater. Once you've done that, you'll always appreciate what malloc() and free() do for you.
I do think that the one area many current curricula seem to fall down in is that students must have early exposure (IMO) to a high-level language without automatic memory management. In our case, it was Pascal which we learned as our first language and C++ which we learned for later software engineering courses. I believe many courses have replaced both of these entirely with Java, which I don't think is acceptable.
You think that was funny? I am so tired of these cliched responses. You waste my time, and the time of everyone else who is actually interested in ReactOS and hoping someone posts something interesting about it.
Frankly, I'd say that it's a serious question. I mean, if ReactOS can run cygwin, firefox and a reasonably good text editor, I could use it for 90% of my daily work. That'd be a great start to being a useful system.
And will the developers move to Outer Elbonia too? If MS had a (e.g.) U.S. court declare that Reactos was an Unclean Abomination That None May Look Upon, I'm pretty sure that the courts would frown on a U.S. resident developer who continued to work on it and claimed US laws didn't apply because they submitted the patches to a server in Outer Elbonia.
IANAL
Neither am I, but I believe designing something that violates patents is not against the law. Only manufacturing (which in the context of software could be interpreted as distributing), selling, importing or using the patented invention for purposes other than research is. If the developers could argue that their purpose in developing is for research (which is perfectly reasonable, IMO), the patents would not apply to them.
Slashdot Mirror
once it was archived, she could have just contacted archive.org. I am fairly certain they have a process by which the author or owner of a domain can request that their already-archived content be removed.
She did, and they did remove her site. The problem, as far as she's concerned, is that according to the terms of her so-called contract, Internet Archive now owe her several hundred thousand dollars for the privelege of having copied her site.
No robots.txt ... how should a crawler read this information?
Even *with* a robots.txt, how should a crawler read the information? Robots.txt files are advisory, not legally mandated, and should remain such. How can they inform a non-sentient computer program of the terms and conditions attached to its accessing a web site in such a way that allows it to make an informed decision about whether or not to access that site? Because that would be necessary, legally speaking, for a contract to be formed.
that is a bit of a cop out. i shouldnt have to be a lawyer to be able to have rights. if it was her intent was clear, and i think it was, she should win. if everypage said 'do not copy' that is that same as putting a 'no tresspassing' sign every 300 feet.
No, it isn't. Trespassing is a law that is somewhat unequivocable: if you remain on somebody else's property after being told to leave (perhaps via such a notice), you are breaking it. While there is a law that can prevent you copying stuff, it has a number of exceptions, which are generally called "fair use". Internet Archive rely on fair use arguments to support the legality of their project. I think they're right. If I tell you not to copy this post, it doesn't mean shit. You can copy it, as long as your use is "fair", legally speaking, whether I want you to or not.
I wonder if duress (compelling the user to agree regardless of their wishes) is grounds for a lawsuit by itself, or if you have to wait until the contract you entered under duress causes some damage to you.
It automatically invalidates the contract, and entitles you to behave as if the contract does not exist. I believe you could get a court to declare the contract void, but it would just be a formality.
IANAL, etc. The above isn't legal advice, whatever it may look like.
While I agree with you in principle, the law suggests that she did post the notice correctly, since (from what I gathered FTFA) the law doesn't make any distinctions between a human eyeball and a robot eyeball. ...attorney John Ottaviani, ..., says the issue is "whether there was 'an adequate notice of the existence of the terms' and a 'meaningful opportunity to review' the terms."
A "meaningful opportunity to review the terms" would (I think) necessarily include somebody sentient agreeing that the terms were reasonable.
The entire UCITA business is a red herring, IMO. That just asserts that if you program a computer to enter into contracts, it is automatically authorised to enter into them on your behalf, even if sometimes it doesn't do it in quite the way you intended. You made the rules it follows, live with them. I think this is a reasonable law.
The case here is different: Internet Archive never intended their spider to form legal contracts. Hence, at least by my understanding of contract law (I'm not a lawyer, but I seem to understand the subject somewhat better than my former law student housemate did) it cannot possibly form a contract. To form a contract, you have to intend to form one. I don't know of any exception to this rule.
She filed pro se.
Idiot for a lawyer and an idiot for a client. It's not going to go well for her, is it?
I mean, just how did she figure she'd get away with charges for "civil theft" (generally defined as "taking property with the intent of permanently depriving its rightful owner of its use") or "conversion" (which also relates to taking property) when no property was taken? And RICO without a racket?
The contract claim will clearly fail -- reading between the lines of the document you link, it was essentially only not struck out at this stage because the court wasn't allowed to consider the evidence presented by Internet Archive that they hadn't seen the notice of the contract.
That leaves only the copyright claim, and I think it's pretty clear that Internet Archive's use is fair use.
Err... last paragraph of above post is mine, not quoted. Forgot to close the damned blockquote tag.
Yes. See the link in the sibling post of yours to a case summary.
...you agree not to mod me down for being First Post!
- RG>
Which is a perfect illustration of the point here. By reading your post I made no such agreement, because I didn't understand before reading it that such agreement would be made. In order to form a contract, both parties involved in the contract must intend to form one. Contracts don't come into existence arbitrarily. You can't accidentally enter into a contract. This is well known legal theory.
In a post on law professor Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law blog, attorney John Ottaviani, a partner at Edwards & Angell in Providence, R.I., says the issue is "whether there was 'an adequate notice of the existence of the terms' and a 'meaningful opportunity to review' the terms."
Which I find it hard to believe the motion for summary dismissal didn't decide never existed. Hopefully the actual trial court will take one look at this supposed contract and laugh.
Generally though, if someone really wants a naked pc, they are probably capable of building it from parts.
Capable, yes. Able to justify it to their employer in a commercial environment? Probably not. It would go something like this:
"You want to do what?"
"Instead of buying these PCs from Dell, which come with a copy of Windows we don't need, I want to buy parts and assemble them into computers myself."
"How much money do we save?"
"About fifty dollars per machine."
"How long will this take?"
"Including testing, about half an hour per machine."
"OK. What about warranties?"
"All the parts will be warrantied for one year."
"The parts. Not the computers."
"Yes."
"So when one breaks, instead of returning the entire machine for service, you have to diagnose which part is faulty before we can return it."
"Yes."
"How long will that take?"
"About half an hour per incident."
"How much am I paying you?"
"Forty dollars per hour."
"If we ever decided to install Windows, how much would it cost to get copies to replace the ones we'll not be buying"
"About a hundred dollars each."
"Go call Dell."
http://www.pcwb.com/catalogue/item/VALPC017
Cel D 331 2.66GHz 512MB 80GB DVD Linux £149 + VAT
From PC World, the UK's largest PC retailer.
They weren't really trying, were they?
Absolutely. You don't even need to go to small retailers, either. Ex:
2 4&CategorySelectedId=11101&NavigationKey=11101,388 360000&InMerch=1 (Dabs is a division of BT, seems like a major vendor to me)
http://www.dabs.com/ProductView.aspx?Quicklinx=3Z
http://www.pcwb.com/catalogue/item/VALPC017 (PC World Business, the Business division of the UK's largest PC retailer, sells a Linux PC for £150)
What more do they want?
Looking at the technical problems such as radiation protection (Mars has no magnetic
field to deflect particles btw)
Radiation reaching the Martian surface is apparently about 2.5 times exposure in low Earth orbit. NASA describe it as high but within manageable limits, and I'm sure they understand the consequences of it better than I do.
Not meaning to spoil your joke or anything, but you do know that the large, visible ice caps at the martian poles are dry ice, right? The water ice is beneath those caps.
Mars' atmosphere a surface pressure 1% (from memory) of the Earths. If we 'release' the frozen ice, won't a whole heap of water simply 'evaporate' into space?
It will immediately boil, yes, but I don't think it will reach the velocity required to escape into space. As I understand it, it would stay in the atmosphere until it is guided by the prevailing winds to either the north or south pole, at which point it will cool enough to freeze onto one of the existing ice deposits there.
Here's a hint: multiply 1370 W/m^2 minus 590 W/m2 by the cross sectional area of mars (around 3.6 x 10^13 m^2) to give you 2.7 x 10^16 Watts.
From the source you cite:
The average solar intensity at the orbit of Mars is 590 W/m2, compared with 1370 W/m2 in Earth orbit
The figures you're citing are orbital figures. Most of that energy is reflected off or absorbed by the atmosphere. Energy reaching the surface of the Earth is more like 200 W/m2, with an additional 70W/m2 absorbed by the atmosphere. I don't know about the Martian surface, I haven't found any sources, but with a thinner atmosphere, I dare say a higher proportion of that energy reaches it. I'd guess you're probably looking at making up a deficit of less than 100W/m2, not 600.
Tit for tat retribution really only works on the playground. And maybe in international spy rings.
Not to mention the Iterated Prisoners' Dilema.
Yes, I'm aware of that. I wrote a significant proportion of that article. However, I still contend that most CS undergrads don't need to know what a spinlock is; they're too low level to be useful in most situations.
From the article:Here at De Montfort I run an ICT degree, which does not assume that programming is an essential skill. The degree focuses on delivering IT services in organisations, on taking a holistic view of computing in organisations, and on holistic thinking.
ie. not Computer Science. For those not familiar with the UK education set up I should also explain that De Montfort University is the old Leicester Polytechnic. The Polys were set up to provide much more practical education than the theoretical stances of the Universities, and a damned good job many did of it too - I'm certainly not playing the one-upmanship card that some do about the old polys, Leicester Poly was a good place and its successor De Montford has reached even further.
But the point stands - this point of view is coming from an academic teaching at a more practically-oriented institution and already running a non-science based course. His viewpoint should be considered against that background.
Exactly. And I don't think his experience of falling student numbers applies across-the-board. My old university is an excellent example: one of the top 10 UK universities for CS. When I graduated (more than a few years ago), the CS department had a small building: two storeys, roughly square, about 10 metres a side. A few years ago it was moved to a new building. Three storeys, about 20 metres a side. I.e., about six times as large. You can't tell me that student numbers have been declining there.
Where does this 25-years old millionaire work?
Is he doing programming or management?
Based on the people I've seen achieve this sort of thing, he's almost certainly doing both, probably management about 4 hours per day and actual development work 8-12 hours. You don't make millions by being just a manager. You have to start out on your own, or in a small team, and you have to pull your weight in terms of doing the real work, alongside the management issues of keeping your business running smoothly as it expands.
Spare me the MIT holier-than-thou bit. Maybe when more than half your undergrads can explain the difference between a spinlock and a semaphore we'll listen.
Why would an average CS undergrad even need to know what a spinlock is? Seriously: spinlocks are specialist tools that are used by system implementors to produce higher level constructs like semaphores, mutexes and monitors. You only need to know about them if you specialise in concurrency.
I'm not convinced that scheme is a better language for teaching algorithm design than Java is. Yes, it has some nice aspects, particularly in that it can be used in a pure functional style, but I honestly don't see any particular benefit it has over Java for teaching undergraduate level data structure & algorithm courses.
Like one of the other posters, I went to a nearly-top-tier UK university (in my case, Warwick), but I'm a little too old to have caught the university Java trend (Java itself had its first public release during my first year; the university switched to Java for its programming courses the year after I graduated), but we did "intro to data structures & algorithms" in Pascal, which worked out OK. I think Java's a better language than Pascal for this because students feel like they're working with a useful language (we all universally hated Pascal; we were forced to program in ISO-standard Pascal, which is the most horrible programming environment I've ever worked with).
We also had separate courses on functional programming (in my year we used Miranda, but subsequent years used ML I believe) and declarative programming (SWI Prolog). We didn't build a CPU (although I believe students on the slight alternative course Computer Systems Engineering may have), but we did work on low-level projects (programming a small robot with light sensors to follow a line in 68000 assembly, and there was a project in NS32000, although I don't recall what it did).
I think choice of language is much less important than the choice of what the lecturers emphasize in the course. And especially, choice of projects. Want the students to learn about memory allocation? Have them implement a memory allocater. Once you've done that, you'll always appreciate what malloc() and free() do for you.
I do think that the one area many current curricula seem to fall down in is that students must have early exposure (IMO) to a high-level language without automatic memory management. In our case, it was Pascal which we learned as our first language and C++ which we learned for later software engineering courses. I believe many courses have replaced both of these entirely with Java, which I don't think is acceptable.
You think that was funny? I am so tired of these cliched responses. You waste my time, and the time of everyone else who is actually interested in ReactOS and hoping someone posts something interesting about it.
Frankly, I'd say that it's a serious question. I mean, if ReactOS can run cygwin, firefox and a reasonably good text editor, I could use it for 90% of my daily work. That'd be a great start to being a useful system.
And will the developers move to Outer Elbonia too? If MS had a (e.g.) U.S. court declare that Reactos was an Unclean Abomination That None May Look Upon, I'm pretty sure that the courts would frown on a U.S. resident developer who continued to work on it and claimed US laws didn't apply because they submitted the patches to a server in Outer Elbonia.
IANAL
Neither am I, but I believe designing something that violates patents is not against the law. Only manufacturing (which in the context of software could be interpreted as distributing), selling, importing or using the patented invention for purposes other than research is. If the developers could argue that their purpose in developing is for research (which is perfectly reasonable, IMO), the patents would not apply to them.
AFAIK, google does index the content of tags.
Erm. "of <NOSCRIPT> tags". Sorry.