What if the CEOs of AOL, Sun, and assorted other MS rivals were all found at the bottom of a river wearing cement overshoes? What if the trail of evidence led directly to MS (the corporate entity), but could not be tied to a particular person? MS may obviously be responsible, yet nothing could be done.
Isn't it interesting, that a corporation is a legal entity. It can make contracts, own things, be sued, make money, and pay taxes, but cannot be put in jail?
There's almost nothing you can do to punish a company other than make it pay money, and if the company happens to have a near-monopoly any fines will just be passed on to the consumers.
Even if the company isn't a monopoly, the real brunt of a heavy fine is rarely felt by those who made the decision (the CEO). It is felt by the people down the food chain in the form of layoffs and wage cuts.
(Side note: The net effect of this is that all injuries must be associated with a monetary value. What effect does this have on society?)
Maybe every corporation should be required to identify a "whipping boy" that will be held personally liable for any wrong doings by the company.
Better yet, maybe the concept of the corporation is obsolete, and should be discarded. (/. writers: subject of future essay?)
*sarcasm* You'll deny them profits in July, and then double their profits in August. *end sarcasm*
I think the better way is to do what someone was recently proposing to do to the oil companies: Target just one company. Get a boycott organized against that one company an send it into the toilet. Make them an example to the rest of the RIAA. Let the RIAA members know that anyone of them could be next.
I propose that we discontinue the use of the words "pirate" and "piracy".
We must start pushing the use of the term "privateer". There are two conflicting national/international interests at war - that of the corporations, and that of the public. Use of the word privateer will help to inform the public of the conflict and help them to realize that they are taking sides in that conflict.
Let's found The Church of Free Knowledge, which asserts that scientific and creative knowledge can not be owned and must be disseminated freely as much as possible.
It is a sin to withold such information, and therefore we are required to spread DeCSS, One-Click, and everything else far and wide. Failing to do so will result in our condemnation to the Hell of Flaming Ignorance.
Who, except those hell-bound atheists in the RIAA and MPAA, could blame us for spreading DeCSS?
I'm still inclined to ask what Scientologist lawyers were doing in the court room during a criminal case. Aren't those cases prosecuted by state attorneys?
and I know that many of them (including my company's) were in danger of going down at Y2K. It
might have been possible to have them all rebooted at midnight instead of fixing the problem, but we were never confident of that as a solution, nor would our customers have been happy about being told that this was a problem. So we fixed them and sent our customers updates before they asked.
Considering that the alternative might have been having satellites fall into the drink, it was probably worth the effort.
There were definitely problems in our internal company systems that would have slipped by had we not been alerted by the "hype".
In spite of our efforts, some of our systems still failed. Not because of Y2K exactly, but because of the GPS rollover problem that occurred shortly before.
And (knowing that this is redundant) no one will ever no how bad it would have been had no one sounded the alarm.
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I have wondered about this for a while.
What if the CEOs of AOL, Sun, and assorted other MS rivals were all found at the bottom of a river wearing cement overshoes? What if the trail of evidence led directly to MS (the corporate entity), but could not be tied to a particular person? MS may obviously be responsible, yet nothing could be done.
Isn't it interesting, that a corporation is a legal entity. It can make contracts, own things, be sued, make money, and pay taxes, but cannot be put in jail?
There's almost nothing you can do to punish a company other than make it pay money, and if the company happens to have a near-monopoly any fines will just be passed on to the consumers.
Even if the company isn't a monopoly, the real brunt of a heavy fine is rarely felt by those who made the decision (the CEO). It is felt by the people down the food chain in the form of layoffs and wage cuts.
(Side note: The net effect of this is that all injuries must be associated with a monetary value. What effect does this have on society?)
Maybe every corporation should be required to identify a "whipping boy" that will be held personally liable for any wrong doings by the company.
Better yet, maybe the concept of the corporation is obsolete, and should be discarded. (/. writers: subject of future essay?)
I'm suing to stop all games, music, software, etc. that exploits my native language: English.
Let's see RIAA and MPAA choke on that one.
*sarcasm* You'll deny them profits in July, and then double their profits in August. *end sarcasm*
I think the better way is to do what someone was recently proposing to do to the oil companies: Target just one company. Get a boycott organized against that one company an send it into the toilet. Make them an example to the rest of the RIAA. Let the RIAA members know that anyone of them could be next.
I propose that we discontinue the use of the words "pirate" and "piracy".
We must start pushing the use of the term "privateer". There are two conflicting national/international interests at war - that of the corporations, and that of the public. Use of the word privateer will help to inform the public of the conflict and help them to realize that they are taking sides in that conflict.
Let's found The Church of Free Knowledge, which asserts that scientific and creative knowledge can not be owned and must be disseminated freely as much as possible.
It is a sin to withold such information, and therefore we are required to spread DeCSS, One-Click, and everything else far and wide. Failing to do so will result in our condemnation to the Hell of Flaming Ignorance.
Who, except those hell-bound atheists in the RIAA and MPAA, could blame us for spreading DeCSS?
This was a criminal case, not a civil case.
I'm still inclined to ask what Scientologist lawyers were doing in the court room during a criminal case. Aren't those cases prosecuted by state attorneys?
I'll bet I can guess what gesture fires the air-to-air missles.
Considering that the alternative might have been having satellites fall into the drink, it was probably worth the effort.
There were definitely problems in our internal company systems that would have slipped by had we not been alerted by the "hype".
In spite of our efforts, some of our systems still failed. Not because of Y2K exactly, but because of the GPS rollover problem that occurred shortly before.
And (knowing that this is redundant) no one will ever no how bad it would have been had no one sounded the alarm.