"I agree it's not gray, but it says the opposite of what you say it says. It says the president is in charge of national defense, and the Congress has no right to usurp that power. It further says that any application of an act of Congress (including that 1978 law) to shift Constitutional responsibilities from one branch (e.g. the President) to another (e.g. the Courts) is automatically void, and that the President has an independent responsibility to honor the Constitution, even if the Congress and the Courts disagree."
True, however, it's not for the Executive branch to judge what is constitutional or not. That's a matter for the Courts. A court declaring a law or executive order unconstitutional is neither an abdication nor shifting of responsibility. Once the courts have ruled on the question of constitutionality, the Executive branch must recognize that decision and abide. It's up to the courts to decide whether a responsibility has been usurped or shifted, not the Executive branch. The Executive branch may choose to ignore a law and claim that it is void for constitutional reasons, however if the courts say otherwise, the Executive branch must abide. Just because the Executive branch declares something as unconstitutional and therefore automatically void doesn't mean it's so. Again, that's for the courts to decide.
"Sure, but so what? Aside from it being unconstitutional to legislate a requirement of approval from a judge before spying on an enemy force, its also absurd to suggest that there should be a requirement for probable cause of a crime before spying on an enemy force, which is the only basis for getting a warrant."
Ah, but it's not just spying on an enemy force, it's spying on US citizens you believe are acting against national interest in collaboration with foreign agents. Regardless of whether those citizens are acting treasonous or not, they are still US citizens and as such are afforded their constitutional rights.
No one has a problem with the Government spying on foreign agents. Spying on it's citizens because they suspect something, that's what due process is for.
"And please stop defending Firefox.. it doesn't deserve it, and you don't know what else is lurking in that source code"
I think the point is, you can, if you so desire.
Sorry, but I'll go with Firefox rather then the alternative. Color me stupid, but one-day fixes are still better then having vulnerabilities go on for weeks or months, as is not uncommon for Microsoft.
There are a number of things wrong with your statement.
First, you CANNOT *implicitily* waive you rights. Any assignment of rights *must be explicit*. Second, students have *all* copyrights to their works to begin with.
Simply because you sign a piece of paper agreeing to something doesn't mean it's contractually legal.
First, when a student writes a paper, ownership lies with them. No if, ands, or buts. This is very clear cut from copyright law. In order for universities to have any claim of ownership, students would have to explicitely agree to a transfer of ownership.
Now, on the surface, it appears to be clear cut. Student signs paper saying he assigns university ownership to any works he creates and turns in. However, it's not.
Normally such agreements are entered in work-for-hire situations. However, students are actually "hiring" the universities to educate them. Financial aid from the university doesn't really change this, because in that case the university is simply accepting payment from another party on behalf of the student. The university is not "hiring" the student to get educated or produce works by providing financial aid. Despite the stance of some universities over this, I doubt it would stand in a court of law.
If push came to shove legally, it's very possible that your university's agreement might not be contractually enforceable.
Let's be honest and call a spade a spade: Communication carriers want to bill both ends of any IP communication. If I'm in DC and call you in Seattle, does my phone company send you a bill for those minutes too? No, but that's exactly what a lot of these communication carriers are essentially proposing and mulling over.
Think of it like this: My phone company decides that when I try to call you, if you aren't a customer of theirs, they will "degrade" *MY* phone call that I initiated. And if it just so happens that my phone company offers a service that competes with you, I won't have any problems with my call being degraded as long as I call them.
I don't have anything against carriers trying to get business or make more money. But when they start entertaining ideas publicly about *degrading the services I pay for* to coerce someone else to pay them, I don't need to sit on my ass to make a judgement call whether that's right or wrong.
A company is just another individual in the eyes of the law; as such it has rights as well as individuals. And when there are conflicting rights, then it's up to the courts to sort out which party's right has precedence if that precedence has not already been established via laws.
It's not a matter of a company "extending" you a right, because neither they nor the government grant you rights. You have all rights inherently. This is the foundation of Constitutional law. A company may decide to forgo *their* rights; however, they cannot forgo *yours*. Individuals may enter into an agreement where they may waive certain rights in exchange, however even this has limitations since of course certain rights cannot be waived.
The correct answer would be: Employers can choose to enforce their rights until such time as that enforcement violates mine. At which time we are headed to court. If a company is found at fault, then at that point they are obligated by the court's ruling to recognize your right as having precedent.
Yes, it's very important to make sure that we throw in the word "communist" because that puts the whole article in perspective. Just saying "the Indian state of Kerala" would have horribly skewered the story.
Pretty blatant attempt at negative association. It's so fucking obvious, it's embarrasing.
That is correct. The Constitution and Bill of Rights specify limitations on the *Government* in regards to individual rights.
However, you are incorrect when you state that a law to regulate privacy could be struck down on the basis of Constitutionality. Civil laws (and courts) routinely provide resolution to conflicting personal rights and interests.
Re:CTO seems to be the wrong person.
on
AOL CTO Shown the Door
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· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, it's not a philosophical point.
Constitutional law is based on the premise that you have all rights. There is no such thing as an "implied" right. This is specifically the intent of Amendment X, "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people".
Amendment IV speaks directly to limitations of governmental power in matters of individual privacy. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
So in that regard, the Bill of Rights does indeed recognize privacy as a fundamental right, and one explicitly stated even if the word "privacy" isn't used directly in the verbage.
Courts resolve conflicts between individual rights, in addition to interpreting limitations of Government in the abridgement of individual rights. It's not a question of "extending" privacy's reach, but rather resolving the conflict of an individual's right to privacy vs. other conflicting individual rights.
You might actually want to reread the article. It says that the best PvP gear will be *comparable* to the best PvE gear. Not *be* the best gear.
The PvP system coming out will be an effort to mirror PvP to match the PvE environment, not the other way around. The best PvP gear will come from Arena, which pits teams against teams. The difference from normal BG's is these teams are persistent, like guilds. And like a raiding guild, rewards come to those teams that work well together and can accomplish goals.
Raiding will still be the better avenue for getting top end gear, it just won't be the *only* avenue.
Technically, you don't have to circumvent CSS in order to rip a DVD. A bit for bit copy of the DVD can be done, and probably is what is being done. Think of it as copying an encrypted file from one place to another. You don't have to break the encryption to do a copy.
This is probably what is being done. I think the part where they will run into problems is that technically, they are selling copies.
So plain old copyright laws are what they are probably going to run afoul of, and not DMCA's circumvention prohibitions.
What you have said doesn't disagree with what I've said. If there is a conflict of rights, then one's right is subsumed to another's. That still means a right is limited by law.
So yes, no matter how you turn the equation around, law is subtractive in all situations. If your right takes precedent over mine, then my right has been lessened while yours remains intact. Your right isn't "additive", because you had it in the first place.
Under constitutional law, you have ALL rights. Law dictates limitations or prohibitions, it does not grant them. A law doesn't have to explicitly state you have a right.
Laws are subtractive, not additive.
This is a common misperception by the public at large.
I think the point that should be made is that regardless of outsourced or not, the metrics for call centers are in many cases just simply screwed up.
The whole point of a call center is to assist a customer and solve their problem. Measuring the number of calls handled, average talk time, or any of the other meaningless call metrics provides no information on whether the core responsibility is being accomplished or not.
I implement call centers, so I see this everyday. The problem is it's easier to count the number of calls and minutes then it is to implement a system that measures a customer's satisfaction. It's easy to spot which companies actually care about their customer's or not simply by looking at what metrics they use.
How-to guides would be hard pressed to be classified as derivative works. The reason so is because they are composed of matters of fact, instructions, and of personal opinion. The fact that you may have to use terms that are part of a copyrighted product in order to provide information, instructions, or opinion doesn't make it a derivative work.
This would be just as ridiculous an argument as classifying a movie review as a "derivative" work because someday I might write a review of my own movie.
Contrary to some folks interpretation, you don't "own" the rights to your work. If you truly "owned" something, then it would always be your property. However, copyright doesn't work that way. You are however granted limited distribution privileges of your creative works for the purposes of providing economic incentive to create those works for a (supposedly) limited amount of time, after which time the author no longer has such priveleges.
Limits to these distribution priveleges include Fair Use and First Sale doctrines.
The problem with so many issues today centers around the flat out misconception of how "Intellectual Property" works. And folks that do know, will tell you that it's in fact not property, but rather priveleges granted by the government. And those priveleges do have limits.
If I want to write a novel set in the Farscape Universe, I'm free to do so right now. I just can't distribute that work for another 75 years or so.
Blizzard is welcome to make money off it's products, but there are limits as to how far copyright laws extend exclusivity priveleges.
RTFA. He has his own website. Kind of shoots the premise of your argument full of holes.
Given that Blizzard has basically bullied Ebay into disallowing the sale of these guides using DMCA notices, I don't think Blizzard has much moral high ground here, let alone legal.
It is not necessary to receive permission to publish a work. If that were so, every review that negatively commented on a movie or a book would be 86'd. It would be impossible to comment on any work without making direct references to it.
As far as your capitalist comment, a company would only allow permission if the work would favorably impact their bottom line.
Lastly, you most certainly can use a "Brand" when selling a product of your own, as long as you make note of whom that "Brand" belongs to, and correctly make attributions. If I say "Cleans 10% better then Tide(TM)", I'm perfectly within my rights to do so. I know you've all seen the commercials, for example, that say Oust is more effective in cleaning airborne bacteria then Lysol.
This guy wasn't attempting to take WoW and start selling it as his own. He created a work of his own that made attributions to any brands, trademarks, and copyrights of the respective owners. Now, if Blizzard had come out with a guide of it's own saying "How to make Phat Gold and Other Farming Techniques" and the author basically repackaged and resold it, then that would be different.
The author is likely to lose not based off technical grounds, but rather from a lack of resources.
The problem with categorization is that you must define parameters to which something is agreed upon to be of the same category.
However, the definitions of those parameters are often explained using language. Language is ambiguous, interpretive, and circular. Other words are used to define a given word. A word in one language may have no easily explainable equivalent in another. Language is a poor platform for use in creating definitions and categorization parameters.
A second point to be made is that things are often incremental. As such, increments can often make for difficulty in distinguishing one thing from another.
The problem with putting things in a box is that nature doesn't like boxes. The second is that a box only exists in your mind.
The granting of monopoly is what provided the incentive for creating the infrastructure in the first place. While services may have been deregulated, that monopoly agreement is still in place. Many places in the US you can get Cable from only one cable company, and DSL from only one phone company.
The main thing keeping competition out is not being granted the same monopoly priveleges to recoup the cost of building that infrastructure.
And of course, we should just ignore the fact that all these other countries have successfully roled out broadband to a large percentage of their citizens, with faster access and cheaper costs then in the U.S.
By all means, let free market work it out, since it's done such a stellar job so far.
Telco's/Cable companies are granted localized monopolies in exchange for providing services and to recoup the cost for investing in the infrastructure necessary for providing those services.
If companies are unwilling to invest in high-speed internet services that the community desires out of fear of cannabalizing their own services, then they are free to do so, but governments/businesses should be under the understanding that the decision to do so most rightly should jeopardize their granted monopolies for that service.
Without mincing words, if your unwilling or unable to provide the service, then expect to have that monopoly privelege revoked and it given to someone that will provide the service.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this sort of thing would be labeled "fighting terrorism" in the US.
"I agree it's not gray, but it says the opposite of what you say it says. It says the president is in charge of national defense, and the Congress has no right to usurp that power. It further says that any application of an act of Congress (including that 1978 law) to shift Constitutional responsibilities from one branch (e.g. the President) to another (e.g. the Courts) is automatically void, and that the President has an independent responsibility to honor the Constitution, even if the Congress and the Courts disagree."
True, however, it's not for the Executive branch to judge what is constitutional or not. That's a matter for the Courts. A court declaring a law or executive order unconstitutional is neither an abdication nor shifting of responsibility. Once the courts have ruled on the question of constitutionality, the Executive branch must recognize that decision and abide. It's up to the courts to decide whether a responsibility has been usurped or shifted, not the Executive branch. The Executive branch may choose to ignore a law and claim that it is void for constitutional reasons, however if the courts say otherwise, the Executive branch must abide. Just because the Executive branch declares something as unconstitutional and therefore automatically void doesn't mean it's so. Again, that's for the courts to decide.
"Sure, but so what? Aside from it being unconstitutional to legislate a requirement of approval from a judge before spying on an enemy force, its also absurd to suggest that there should be a requirement for probable cause of a crime before spying on an enemy force, which is the only basis for getting a warrant."
Ah, but it's not just spying on an enemy force, it's spying on US citizens you believe are acting against national interest in collaboration with foreign agents. Regardless of whether those citizens are acting treasonous or not, they are still US citizens and as such are afforded their constitutional rights.
No one has a problem with the Government spying on foreign agents. Spying on it's citizens because they suspect something, that's what due process is for.
"And please stop defending Firefox.. it doesn't deserve it, and you don't know what else is lurking in that source code"
I think the point is, you can, if you so desire.
Sorry, but I'll go with Firefox rather then the alternative. Color me stupid, but one-day fixes are still better then having vulnerabilities go on for weeks or months, as is not uncommon for Microsoft.
There are a number of things wrong with your statement.
First, you CANNOT *implicitily* waive you rights. Any assignment of rights *must be explicit*. Second, students have *all* copyrights to their works to begin with.
Simply because you sign a piece of paper agreeing to something doesn't mean it's contractually legal.
First, when a student writes a paper, ownership lies with them. No if, ands, or buts. This is very clear cut from copyright law. In order for universities to have any claim of ownership, students would have to explicitely agree to a transfer of ownership.
Now, on the surface, it appears to be clear cut. Student signs paper saying he assigns university ownership to any works he creates and turns in. However, it's not.
Normally such agreements are entered in work-for-hire situations. However, students are actually "hiring" the universities to educate them. Financial aid from the university doesn't really change this, because in that case the university is simply accepting payment from another party on behalf of the student. The university is not "hiring" the student to get educated or produce works by providing financial aid. Despite the stance of some universities over this, I doubt it would stand in a court of law.
If push came to shove legally, it's very possible that your university's agreement might not be contractually enforceable.
How about we don't?
Let's be honest and call a spade a spade: Communication carriers want to bill both ends of any IP communication. If I'm in DC and call you in Seattle, does my phone company send you a bill for those minutes too? No, but that's exactly what a lot of these communication carriers are essentially proposing and mulling over.
Think of it like this: My phone company decides that when I try to call you, if you aren't a customer of theirs, they will "degrade" *MY* phone call that I initiated. And if it just so happens that my phone company offers a service that competes with you, I won't have any problems with my call being degraded as long as I call them.
I don't have anything against carriers trying to get business or make more money. But when they start entertaining ideas publicly about *degrading the services I pay for* to coerce someone else to pay them, I don't need to sit on my ass to make a judgement call whether that's right or wrong.
A company is just another individual in the eyes of the law; as such it has rights as well as individuals. And when there are conflicting rights, then it's up to the courts to sort out which party's right has precedence if that precedence has not already been established via laws.
It's not a matter of a company "extending" you a right, because neither they nor the government grant you rights. You have all rights inherently. This is the foundation of Constitutional law. A company may decide to forgo *their* rights; however, they cannot forgo *yours*. Individuals may enter into an agreement where they may waive certain rights in exchange, however even this has limitations since of course certain rights cannot be waived.
The correct answer would be: Employers can choose to enforce their rights until such time as that enforcement violates mine. At which time we are headed to court. If a company is found at fault, then at that point they are obligated by the court's ruling to recognize your right as having precedent.
Yes, it's very important to make sure that we throw in the word "communist" because that puts the whole article in perspective. Just saying "the Indian state of Kerala" would have horribly skewered the story.
Pretty blatant attempt at negative association. It's so fucking obvious, it's embarrasing.
That is correct. The Constitution and Bill of Rights specify limitations on the *Government* in regards to individual rights.
However, you are incorrect when you state that a law to regulate privacy could be struck down on the basis of Constitutionality. Civil laws (and courts) routinely provide resolution to conflicting personal rights and interests.
Actually, it's not a philosophical point.
Constitutional law is based on the premise that you have all rights. There is no such thing as an "implied" right. This is specifically the intent of Amendment X, "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people".
Amendment IV speaks directly to limitations of governmental power in matters of individual privacy. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
So in that regard, the Bill of Rights does indeed recognize privacy as a fundamental right, and one explicitly stated even if the word "privacy" isn't used directly in the verbage.
Courts resolve conflicts between individual rights, in addition to interpreting limitations of Government in the abridgement of individual rights. It's not a question of "extending" privacy's reach, but rather resolving the conflict of an individual's right to privacy vs. other conflicting individual rights.
You might actually want to reread the article. It says that the best PvP gear will be *comparable* to the best PvE gear. Not *be* the best gear.
The PvP system coming out will be an effort to mirror PvP to match the PvE environment, not the other way around. The best PvP gear will come from Arena, which pits teams against teams. The difference from normal BG's is these teams are persistent, like guilds. And like a raiding guild, rewards come to those teams that work well together and can accomplish goals.
Raiding will still be the better avenue for getting top end gear, it just won't be the *only* avenue.
Technically, you don't have to circumvent CSS in order to rip a DVD. A bit for bit copy of the DVD can be done, and probably is what is being done. Think of it as copying an encrypted file from one place to another. You don't have to break the encryption to do a copy.
This is probably what is being done. I think the part where they will run into problems is that technically, they are selling copies.
So plain old copyright laws are what they are probably going to run afoul of, and not DMCA's circumvention prohibitions.
What you have said doesn't disagree with what I've said. If there is a conflict of rights, then one's right is subsumed to another's. That still means a right is limited by law.
So yes, no matter how you turn the equation around, law is subtractive in all situations. If your right takes precedent over mine, then my right has been lessened while yours remains intact. Your right isn't "additive", because you had it in the first place.
No no no no no.
Under constitutional law, you have ALL rights. Law dictates limitations or prohibitions, it does not grant them. A law doesn't have to explicitly state you have a right.
Laws are subtractive, not additive.
This is a common misperception by the public at large.
I think the point that should be made is that regardless of outsourced or not, the metrics for call centers are in many cases just simply screwed up.
The whole point of a call center is to assist a customer and solve their problem. Measuring the number of calls handled, average talk time, or any of the other meaningless call metrics provides no information on whether the core responsibility is being accomplished or not.
I implement call centers, so I see this everyday. The problem is it's easier to count the number of calls and minutes then it is to implement a system that measures a customer's satisfaction. It's easy to spot which companies actually care about their customer's or not simply by looking at what metrics they use.
Of course, the little fly in your theory is that were such to happen, you couldn't know whether it was due to ESP or some other mechanism.
Paradoxically, it would be very unprobable if there were *not* variations when comparing randomly sampled time periods.
How-to guides would be hard pressed to be classified as derivative works. The reason so is because they are composed of matters of fact, instructions, and of personal opinion. The fact that you may have to use terms that are part of a copyrighted product in order to provide information, instructions, or opinion doesn't make it a derivative work.
This would be just as ridiculous an argument as classifying a movie review as a "derivative" work because someday I might write a review of my own movie.
Contrary to some folks interpretation, you don't "own" the rights to your work. If you truly "owned" something, then it would always be your property. However, copyright doesn't work that way. You are however granted limited distribution privileges of your creative works for the purposes of providing economic incentive to create those works for a (supposedly) limited amount of time, after which time the author no longer has such priveleges.
Limits to these distribution priveleges include Fair Use and First Sale doctrines.
The problem with so many issues today centers around the flat out misconception of how "Intellectual Property" works. And folks that do know, will tell you that it's in fact not property, but rather priveleges granted by the government. And those priveleges do have limits.
If I want to write a novel set in the Farscape Universe, I'm free to do so right now. I just can't distribute that work for another 75 years or so.
Blizzard is welcome to make money off it's products, but there are limits as to how far copyright laws extend exclusivity priveleges.
RTFA. The guide developer is suing Blizzard, not the other way around.
RTFA. He has his own website. Kind of shoots the premise of your argument full of holes.
Given that Blizzard has basically bullied Ebay into disallowing the sale of these guides using DMCA notices, I don't think Blizzard has much moral high ground here, let alone legal.
It is not necessary to receive permission to publish a work. If that were so, every review that negatively commented on a movie or a book would be 86'd. It would be impossible to comment on any work without making direct references to it.
As far as your capitalist comment, a company would only allow permission if the work would favorably impact their bottom line.
Lastly, you most certainly can use a "Brand" when selling a product of your own, as long as you make note of whom that "Brand" belongs to, and correctly make attributions. If I say "Cleans 10% better then Tide(TM)", I'm perfectly within my rights to do so. I know you've all seen the commercials, for example, that say Oust is more effective in cleaning airborne bacteria then Lysol.
This guy wasn't attempting to take WoW and start selling it as his own. He created a work of his own that made attributions to any brands, trademarks, and copyrights of the respective owners. Now, if Blizzard had come out with a guide of it's own saying "How to make Phat Gold and Other Farming Techniques" and the author basically repackaged and resold it, then that would be different.
The author is likely to lose not based off technical grounds, but rather from a lack of resources.
The problem with categorization is that you must define parameters to which something is agreed upon to be of the same category.
However, the definitions of those parameters are often explained using language. Language is ambiguous, interpretive, and circular. Other words are used to define a given word. A word in one language may have no easily explainable equivalent in another. Language is a poor platform for use in creating definitions and categorization parameters.
A second point to be made is that things are often incremental. As such, increments can often make for difficulty in distinguishing one thing from another.
The problem with putting things in a box is that nature doesn't like boxes. The second is that a box only exists in your mind.
The granting of monopoly is what provided the incentive for creating the infrastructure in the first place. While services may have been deregulated, that monopoly agreement is still in place. Many places in the US you can get Cable from only one cable company, and DSL from only one phone company.
The main thing keeping competition out is not being granted the same monopoly priveleges to recoup the cost of building that infrastructure.
And of course, we should just ignore the fact that all these other countries have successfully roled out broadband to a large percentage of their citizens, with faster access and cheaper costs then in the U.S.
By all means, let free market work it out, since it's done such a stellar job so far.
Telco's/Cable companies are granted localized monopolies in exchange for providing services and to recoup the cost for investing in the infrastructure necessary for providing those services.
If companies are unwilling to invest in high-speed internet services that the community desires out of fear of cannabalizing their own services, then they are free to do so, but governments/businesses should be under the understanding that the decision to do so most rightly should jeopardize their granted monopolies for that service.
Without mincing words, if your unwilling or unable to provide the service, then expect to have that monopoly privelege revoked and it given to someone that will provide the service.
Damned if you think you will, and Damned if you think you won't.
Lesson here kiddies: Don't think.
It comes from the article itself:
"Anyone who pays an examination fee and submits prior art showing the protected item is not novel could challenge the limited patent."