"You may not be aware, but Intel's illegal actions hurt consumers -- everyday," read the ad, which mostly is a 350-word letter from AMD chief Hector Ruiz. "Computer buyers pay higher prices inflated by Intel's monopoly profits."...amounts to nothing more than the barest description of the complaint being brought against Intel. In other words this is the same as saying "we acuse Intel of being a monopoly, go read the complaint".
I suspect that AMD's lawyers have told them that they can't be sued for libel even if they lose. You can't sue for libel or slander for statements made in court, or in court documents. If AMD just told people to go read the court documents, and didn't actually repeat the potentially libelous claims in those documents, then they can't be touched.
This is a ridiculous statement, because there's no reasonable way to evaluate its truth.
Sure there is. You take the drugs that were approved ealier in the EU. Figure out how many the bad ones would have killed in the US had they been approved at the same time, then figure out how many the good ones would have saved had they been approved at the same time, then calculate the difference. It's been done, and I'm afraid the result is that the FDA is one of the leading causes of death in the US (same ball park as automobile accidents - tens of thousands of people a year).
The US was certainly fortunate to be spared the horrible results of Thalidomide. But the stricter rules in the US have (rough estimate) caused hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, not to mention untold suffering.
The problem with comparing this to an "innocent until proven guilty" legal system is that with such a legal system the government is refraining from doing harm. In the case of the FDA their are interfering in private choices about medical care and killing more people than they save.
It is a moral issue, but also a clear cut legal one (if the facts are as presented). PearPC and any other copyright holder can seek injunctive relief (i.e. a court order saying something like "stop using this code") and statutory damages (no need to show actual damages).
This case involved international comerce. All international matters are exclusively the concern of the federal government, not state governments. If had involved inter-state comerce it would still be a legitimate concern for the federal government (see the inter-state comerce clause of the constitution).
It only becomes a "states rights" matter if all the parties involved fall within the borders of one state. Then there is some disagreement about whether the federal government should be involved. Current legal doctrine on this question is expansive - if an activity has any comercial, or even potentially comercial, aspect then the federal government can regulate. Although there are some signs of a shift back to the older view that there actually has to be some comerce going on, and it actually has to cross state lines.
Anyway, this case is not even remotely a matter of "states rights". It is, however, a matter of individual rights (i.e. not whether the feds can regulate in your state, but whether the feds can regulate in your bedroom). Marriage law is another matter entirely.
That means it is legal for *you* to obtain and install mp3 software in Denmark. Redhat is a US company. If they provide you with the software then they can be sued for patent infringement.
No, but all of these things have been enforced through threats to pull FCC licenses and by threats of lawsuits, so yes it is censorship even in the strictest sense.
As I said, you may approve of the goals, (in some of these cases I do as well) but this just makes it censorship that you approve of.
Apparently, because liberals have been doing it for years. Gender equity, more "color" in positive roles, less smoking, etc and so on. Of course people don't call it censorship when they approve of the censoring.
Depends very much on what you count as "most of Europe". From the WaPo...
Not so in France, where four prisoners from the U.S. naval base were arrested as soon as they arrived home in July, and haven't been heard from since. Under French law, they could remain locked up for as long as three years while authorities decide whether to put them on trial -- a legal limbo that their attorneys charge is not much different than what they faced at Guantanamo.
Armed with some of the strictest anti-terrorism laws and policies in Europe, the French government has aggressively targeted Islamic radicals and other people deemed a potential terrorist threat. While other Western countries debate the proper balance between security and individual rights, France has experienced scant public dissent over tactics that would be controversial, if not illegal, in the United States and some other countries.
France is the worst, but you would be surprised how few limitations there are on what intelligence services in Europe can do when "national security" is involved.
Q: "How will this affect evolution?" A: Not at all. Look up "Lysenko".
Some of these animals are designed for growing human-compatible parts. That means the genetic changes have been carried out in the germ-line, so that they will breed true. "Evolution" will be affected in the sense that these species will permanently acquire new genetic attributes.
So then patents protect the abstract concept of something from being reimplemented.
...but this is wrong...
This is precisely because it *is* the abstract idea and *not* an implementation that is protected.
...because you can do all sorts of things with the abstract ideas involved without violating the patent. Hell, you can even modify or add to the ideas and get your own patent on the resulting invention. That's because it is *not* the abstract idea that is protected. From the USPTO...
Interpretations of the statute by the courts have defined the limits of the field of subject matter which can be patented, thus it has been held that the laws of nature, physical phenomena
and abstract ideas are not patentable subject matter.
A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required.
Patents protect the abstract concept of something.
Patents do not protect abstract ideas. Direct infringement occurs when a patented invention is implemented, not when the idea of the invention is expressed, explained, described, or anything else like that.
IANAL, but they probably have permission. Publishing firms have armies of lawyers to prevent infringement.
Publishing code in a book, or any other sort of description of an invention, is not patent infringement (although it can be copyright infringement if you copied the actual code from somewhere else).
"Am I making a profit based on this person's idea?"
And this is the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is "Am I cutting into the market of the patent holder?" If you are making money off what you are doing then the answer is always yes (because the patent holder could be making that money instead), but you might be cutting into his market even if you are not making money. If you give their invention away for free then they can sue for lost revenues.
Whether you try to sell it or use it for comercial purposes has little to do with the matter. What matters is whether you are distributing a description of the invention, or the invention itself.
Yes, obviously the problem is here that when it comes to software the task of drawing the line between the two is a real bitch. Maybe impossible. But to hazard a wild guess, if you distribute some code in a book, you will be fine, if you distribute a binary then you will be leaglly screwed. If you distribute code in machine readable form then you are rolling the dice.
(1) Unlike most of these countries the US is both highly industrialised and enjoys high growth, which means that it would be extremely hard for the US to comply with Kyoto. Most of the countries you listed are either exempt, or have had low or no growth so they will have to do very little to comply.
(2) Unlike most of these countries, when the US ratifies a treaty it actually becomes law, so the government is obliged to comply. For other countires compliance with treaties is a foreign policy matter, i.e. strictly optional, so they can sign something like Kyoto with no intention of ever complying.
Short version: the US takes treaties seriously and does not have a fucked economy.
Your lawyer friend may not have thought carefully enough about this.
Copyright by itself does not entail any rights to control the use of a copy. And distributing a copy through bittorrent does imply permission to further distribute copies because that is the way that bittorrent works. There is no way, short of breaking the system in some way, to recieve a copy without also distributing more copies.
A copyright holder can sometimes get further rights by means of an EULA, but that is another matter.
(1) China/India is now out-pacing the US. (2) Yawn, they are finally catching up with the USA of the 1950's.
Neither strikes me as justified. The US is still pushing the boundaries of exploration and science in ways that neither country can hope to match any time soon, but that doesn't mean that their efforts count for nothing. Both countries are again making significant contributions to the sum of human achievement and knowledge. We should all be happy about that.
CBS and the other networks pay for some stupendously useless exit-polls to be done. Then they leak the results to a web-site or two (i.e. Drudge). Then they use the leaks as an excuse to blather on about the results of their useless exit polls for hours. Then they get stung when it is revealed just how far off the mark the polls were.
Then they blame blogs in general for their lack of journalistic standards.
Now the DHS seems to see its role as more than a simple anti-terrorist investigative agency.
The DHS was never intended to be just an anti-terrorist agency and it never had a narrow charter. The whole idea was to put everything relating to domestic security under one roof. Among the many former departments and agencies that it includes are Customs, Immigration, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service.
Trademarks don't expire. Trademark, copyright, and patent are entirely different things. Reading the summary you can't tell which of these areas of law was involved and you get the impression that the action was taken on expired IP.
The article states that the action was taken on the basis of a trademark. With a name like "Magic Cube" if the toy is anything at all like a Rubic's Cube then it almost certainly does infringe on the Rubic's Cube trademark.
And why all the fake wonderment about the department of Homeland Security handling the case? In case anyone missed the press release the department is not some niche organisation that deals specifically with terrorism. It's a big tarball of a whole bunch of departments and old law enforcement angencies that used to deal with all manner of federal law enforcement issues. They do lots of things besides deal with terrorism.
Slashdot Mirror
I did RTFA, and this...
...amounts to nothing more than the barest description of the complaint being brought against Intel. In other words this is the same as saying "we acuse Intel of being a monopoly, go read the complaint".
"You may not be aware, but Intel's illegal actions hurt consumers -- everyday," read the ad, which mostly is a 350-word letter from AMD chief Hector Ruiz. "Computer buyers pay higher prices inflated by Intel's monopoly profits."
I suspect that AMD's lawyers have told them that they can't be sued for libel even if they lose. You can't sue for libel or slander for statements made in court, or in court documents. If AMD just told people to go read the court documents, and didn't actually repeat the potentially libelous claims in those documents, then they can't be touched.
Medical Research 101: You can't compare the effects of 2 drugs on 2 different populations.
Pfft - nonsense. If that were true it would be impossible to do drug trials at all.
I agree that such studies can be done (using european data), but NO respectible peer-review journal would take up a study like the one you suggested.
Slashdot is peer reviewed, but not respectable, so I figured I could leave out some of the details.
This is a ridiculous statement, because there's no reasonable way to evaluate its truth.
Sure there is. You take the drugs that were approved ealier in the EU. Figure out how many the bad ones would have killed in the US had they been approved at the same time, then figure out how many the good ones would have saved had they been approved at the same time, then calculate the difference. It's been done, and I'm afraid the result is that the FDA is one of the leading causes of death in the US (same ball park as automobile accidents - tens of thousands of people a year).
The US was certainly fortunate to be spared the horrible results of Thalidomide. But the stricter rules in the US have (rough estimate) caused hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, not to mention untold suffering.
The problem with comparing this to an "innocent until proven guilty" legal system is that with such a legal system the government is refraining from doing harm. In the case of the FDA their are interfering in private choices about medical care and killing more people than they save.
Doing what for years? Building stuff that doesn't quite work?
It is a moral issue, but also a clear cut legal one (if the facts are as presented). PearPC and any other copyright holder can seek injunctive relief (i.e. a court order saying something like "stop using this code") and statutory damages (no need to show actual damages).
This case involved international comerce. All international matters are exclusively the concern of the federal government, not state governments. If had involved inter-state comerce it would still be a legitimate concern for the federal government (see the inter-state comerce clause of the constitution).
It only becomes a "states rights" matter if all the parties involved fall within the borders of one state. Then there is some disagreement about whether the federal government should be involved. Current legal doctrine on this question is expansive - if an activity has any comercial, or even potentially comercial, aspect then the federal government can regulate. Although there are some signs of a shift back to the older view that there actually has to be some comerce going on, and it actually has to cross state lines.
Anyway, this case is not even remotely a matter of "states rights". It is, however, a matter of individual rights (i.e. not whether the feds can regulate in your state, but whether the feds can regulate in your bedroom). Marriage law is another matter entirely.
Yeah, next thing you know they will be predicting the fall of Communism.
That means it is legal for *you* to obtain and install mp3 software in Denmark. Redhat is a US company. If they provide you with the software then they can be sued for patent infringement.
Where you live makes no difference to Redhat's legal libility for patent violations.
Will the government fine you...?
No, but all of these things have been enforced through threats to pull FCC licenses and by threats of lawsuits, so yes it is censorship even in the strictest sense.
As I said, you may approve of the goals, (in some of these cases I do as well) but this just makes it censorship that you approve of.
Is that acceptable?
Apparently, because liberals have been doing it for years. Gender equity, more "color" in positive roles, less smoking, etc and so on. Of course people don't call it censorship when they approve of the censoring.
France is the worst, but you would be surprised how few limitations there are on what intelligence services in Europe can do when "national security" is involved.
Q: "How will this affect evolution?"
A: Not at all. Look up "Lysenko".
Some of these animals are designed for growing human-compatible parts. That means the genetic changes have been carried out in the germ-line, so that they will breed true. "Evolution" will be affected in the sense that these species will permanently acquire new genetic attributes.
So then patents protect the abstract concept of something from being reimplemented.
This is precisely because it *is* the abstract idea and *not* an implementation that is protected.
This is mostly wrong.
Patents protect the abstract concept of something.
Patents do not protect abstract ideas. Direct infringement occurs when a patented invention is implemented, not when the idea of the invention is expressed, explained, described, or anything else like that.
IANAL, but they probably have permission. Publishing firms have armies of lawyers to prevent infringement.
Publishing code in a book, or any other sort of description of an invention, is not patent infringement (although it can be copyright infringement if you copied the actual code from somewhere else).
"Am I making a profit based on this person's idea?"
And this is the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is "Am I cutting into the market of the patent holder?" If you are making money off what you are doing then the answer is always yes (because the patent holder could be making that money instead), but you might be cutting into his market even if you are not making money. If you give their invention away for free then they can sue for lost revenues.
Whether you try to sell it or use it for comercial purposes has little to do with the matter. What matters is whether you are distributing a description of the invention, or the invention itself.
Yes, obviously the problem is here that when it comes to software the task of drawing the line between the two is a real bitch. Maybe impossible. But to hazard a wild guess, if you distribute some code in a book, you will be fine, if you distribute a binary then you will be leaglly screwed. If you distribute code in machine readable form then you are rolling the dice.
(1) Unlike most of these countries the US is both highly industrialised and enjoys high growth, which means that it would be extremely hard for the US to comply with Kyoto. Most of the countries you listed are either exempt, or have had low or no growth so they will have to do very little to comply.
(2) Unlike most of these countries, when the US ratifies a treaty it actually becomes law, so the government is obliged to comply. For other countires compliance with treaties is a foreign policy matter, i.e. strictly optional, so they can sign something like Kyoto with no intention of ever complying.
Short version: the US takes treaties seriously and does not have a fucked economy.
Your lawyer friend may not have thought carefully enough about this.
Copyright by itself does not entail any rights to control the use of a copy. And distributing a copy through bittorrent does imply permission to further distribute copies because that is the way that bittorrent works. There is no way, short of breaking the system in some way, to recieve a copy without also distributing more copies.
A copyright holder can sometimes get further rights by means of an EULA, but that is another matter.
What's with all this "your" stuff? I'm not American.
the fact that the US hasn't led global inovation for decades is clear to just about everyone. Yet there is this delusional arrogance
Decades? So we are not counting the creation of the internet or the human genome project - just to pick a couple of obvious examples?
Your "everything about America sucks" kind of post is just as unreasonable as the "Go USA!" mantra you complain about.
There seem to be two responses going:
(1) China/India is now out-pacing the US.
(2) Yawn, they are finally catching up with the USA of the 1950's.
Neither strikes me as justified. The US is still pushing the boundaries of exploration and science in ways that neither country can hope to match any time soon, but that doesn't mean that their efforts count for nothing. Both countries are again making significant contributions to the sum of human achievement and knowledge. We should all be happy about that.
CBS and the other networks pay for some stupendously useless exit-polls to be done. Then they leak the results to a web-site or two (i.e. Drudge). Then they use the leaks as an excuse to blather on about the results of their useless exit polls for hours. Then they get stung when it is revealed just how far off the mark the polls were.
Then they blame blogs in general for their lack of journalistic standards.
Pfft. I fart in their general direction.
Now the DHS seems to see its role as more than a simple anti-terrorist investigative agency.
The DHS was never intended to be just an anti-terrorist agency and it never had a narrow charter. The whole idea was to put everything relating to domestic security under one roof. Among the many former departments and agencies that it includes are Customs, Immigration, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service.
Trademarks don't expire. Trademark, copyright, and patent are entirely different things. Reading the summary you can't tell which of these areas of law was involved and you get the impression that the action was taken on expired IP.
The article states that the action was taken on the basis of a trademark. With a name like "Magic Cube" if the toy is anything at all like a Rubic's Cube then it almost certainly does infringe on the Rubic's Cube trademark.
And why all the fake wonderment about the department of Homeland Security handling the case? In case anyone missed the press release the department is not some niche organisation that deals specifically with terrorism. It's a big tarball of a whole bunch of departments and old law enforcement angencies that used to deal with all manner of federal law enforcement issues. They do lots of things besides deal with terrorism.