They're suing for copyright infringement as well as libel? Please tell me there's something more to the libel allegations than just the posting of the contract. Otherwise, they're either suing for libel over the posting of a legitimate document or suing for copyright infringement over a document they do not own.
As with catalog sales in the days before the Internet, Amazon.com is not required to collect taxes in any jurisdiction where it doesn't have a business presence. There's no trickery involved. Amazon doesn't collect any taxes it isn't required by law to collect, just like you don't pay taxes in states that you've never set foot in.
Since only the federal government can regulate interstate commerce, the ability of State X to force Amazon.com to collect its taxes when it doesn't have a presence in that state would require federal legislation to that effect. Also, for any such federal law to work it seems to me that tax rules and rates would have to be simplified across all 50 states. There's an effort to do so called the Streamlined Sales Tax Project, but despite its name it strikes me as ridiculously overcomplicated (as in "you need a certified computer program to handle the differences between each state's rules") due to the desire to please all the participating states.
Amazing. Given US's kneejerk reactions to these kinds of events, is it at all surprising that more and more people are refusing to visit the United States for anything other than business purposes? These idiots either don't realize or don't care that overreaction does have its price.
Security is getting so ridiculous that I'm forced to wonder how long it will be until these people decide to ban passengers. No passengers -> no terrorists -> no victims.
I wonder how American proponents of such a principle would react to an American citizen being sued and convicted in China for posting information that China considers illegal to a US website that is nevertheless available to Chinese citizens.
Canada should not allow itself to be bullied into adopting bad copyright law. While the European Union appears quite eager to be as bad (or worse) than the United States in terms of harmful copyright legislation, I sincerely hope Canada will put its citizens interests above those of copyright holders. I'm not against globalization, but countries must sometimes defend their sovereignty for the sake of their citizens.
Sorry Slashdot, but I agree completely with Ted Alvin Klaudt. If I were Ted Alvin Klaudt and had been convicted, as Ted Alvin Klaudt was, of raping my foster daughters, I too would have scrambled for ways to prevent the media from commenting on my transgressions, just like Ted Alvin Klaudt is doing. Some may say employing copyright law in the manner of Ted Alvin Klaudt constitutes blatant abuse of the legal system, but I, as Ted Alvin Klaudt, feel otherwise. Ted Alvin Klaudt hasn't done anything wrong (with respect to the copyright thing, not the rape thing), and I wish him (Ted Alvin Klaudt) the best of luck.
On the issue of kids faking their birth date after being initially rejected, Game Politics said:
"... half of these worlds did not accept kids who re-registered on the same computer using a modified birth date."
I responded:
I presume this means these systems would also reject adults who try to re-register (either after entering the wrong date by accident, or because they have kids who've unsuccessfully tried to register on the same computer)? I hope such a system doesn't ever become law; it seems like such a terrible idea, especially considering how silly the "problem" really is.
The FTC should have better things to worry about than explict content and kids not being segregated from adults.
We cannot altogether avoid our instincts, but we are certainly capable of doing better than our instincts in most situations. Policies borne out of paranoia aren't harmless, and besides are generally less effective than policies that are well thought out. "Think of the children" policies are usually knee-jerk reactions that are out of proportion to the actual threat. We shall not face the extinction of mankind for abandoning policies that address mostly imagined threats, but we are at risk of suffering serious negative side effects whenever people's irrational fears are allowed to influence the law to such a degree as is happening here.
This is not about standing proud in front of a charging lion (which both instinct and reason agree is a terrible idea), but about accepting and embracing the power of the mind to distinguish between real and imagined threats despite what our primitive instincts might tell us. Humans are capable of that to a significant degree, and it's actually a step forward in terms of evolution.
A society that concerns itself with real threats and doesn't waste time on irrational ones will be much better of than a paranoid society. The idea that humans will become extinct for not freaking out is itself irrational, and false.
The difference between humans and other animals is that humans are able to see beyond their biological instincts and consider things as they actually are. Perhaps humans are still too primitive to prevent their rational minds from being co-opted by irrational instinctive impulses, which is something I don't see as a sign of strength. Growth lies in the opposite direction, where factual concerns trump irrational and often harmful thoughts such as "let's assume adults who talk to children are all up to no good".
"Think of the children" belongs in the past. We should strive to outgrow it rather than let it take over our lives -- and our minds.
"Those who use their computers to lure children for sexual purposes often groom them online by first gaining their trust through conversations about their home life, their personal interests or other innocuous topics."
How many people are going to be arrested for asking children about their "personal interests or other innocuous topics" on the grounds that the person asking the questions might perhaps turn out to be a pedophile?
"[The law] makes it a crime to communicate by computer with underage children or adolescents for the purpose of facilitating the commission of the offences."
...
He said the new Internet luring law "criminalizes conduct that precedes the commission of the sexual offences."
How do you establish the adult's intentions unless the adult has expressed a desire to commit an offense against the child, thus not requiring the broader interpretation of the law? The way the judge's decision is described, it would seem it isn't necessary to establish criminal intent, thus making people liable for conversations that are truly innocent.
There's often been an air of paranoia around many of the laws that are supposed to address the online victimization of children, but this one is about the most ridiculous I've seen. Idiots at the helm is all I can say.
The most ridiculous thing is the part where Mr. Lawyer claims that what a firefighter gets paid for "is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax." According to this guy's idea of fair compensation for firefighters, these people would be better off starting fires to drum up business on days when there's no fire, because apparently they're not really doing any work unless they're literally fighting fires.
"Your position was that Google should be able to scan the books (despite the authors' "exclusive rights") freely, search them and thus profit from them, just not display them. If that's your view, I don't see how you can feel that the class is betrayed by the settlement. Every single member of the class is better off than if Google hadn't been sued. At best, they get some money. At worst, they are exactly where they were before."
Scanning books for the purpose of making them searchable online could, ideally, be considered fair use. Displaying or selling full new copies of those books, on the other hand, would definitely not be considered fair use. There's no way Google could legally have gotten away with that before the settlement. The settlement granted Google a great deal more than it originally tried to grab for itself.
"Google gets "exclusive rights" to nothing."
Yes, I know. The author has exclusive rights under the law. The settlement doesn't transfer those rights to Google, but it does grant Google the right to exploit some of those otherwise exclusive rights. That's all I meant.
Copyright grants authors exclusive rights to their books for the entire length of the copyright term. This means Google is not allowed to sell out-of-print books without the author's permission, nor does it get to decide for how much the books are to be sold to them. The lawyers have betrayed the class by turning a lawsuit against Google into a settlement that benefits Google more than it benefits the class. The class was expecting a remedy, but instead they got their exclusive rights sold to Google under the terms of the settlement.
Perhaps it's true that the world would benefit from an orphaned works policy, but a class action lawsuit is not the proper place to set such policies. Orphaned works is a legislative issue, not to be settled for all authors through strategic class-action settlements.
While I'm totally on Google's side when it comes to scanning books -- with or without permission -- for the purposes of making them searchable online, I find it outrageous that a lawsuit designed to stop Google from doing that should end up granting them rights they wouldn't have enjoyed before the lawsuit. It feels like a betrayal of the class by a plaintiff with somewhat narrower interests than those of the parties actually represented by the class.
It would probably be more accurate to say that websites (not servers) are vulnerable to such an attack. After all, unless I've misread TFA, no code is actually being executed server side. Instead, what's happening is that any SWF's posted to a publicly-accessible location are being served under the server's domain and therefore any scripts in the SWF will execute with rights to access that domain. There's nothing the SWF can do through scripting that a visitor can't do directly, so depending on how you look at it you could say the server itself isn't vulnerable to this, but the website and the clients are.
This is part of the reason why I think government-funded Internet access is generally a bad idea. Governments are too trigger-happy with regard to avoiding liability, and are otherwise too censor-prone to properly deal with the significant responsibility of administering the local population's Internet connection.
Considering Apple's litigious nature and the fact that it once sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing on the MacOS "look and feel", I can easily see why Microsoft would want to distance itself from this guy's statements. Apple has always wanted to have exclusive rights over Mac-like graphical interfaces, damn the negative consequences to the rest of the industry.
This guy's statements are fodder for Apple's bloodthirsty lawyers. Should it turn out he's lying about Microsoft's intentions, firing him would seem to be the best course of action.
In Ubuntu, whenever I try to mount a drive but don't have the necessary privilege, I am presented with a list of users who do have such privilege and I am prompted pick a particular user and to provide that user's password. Even if no such list were presented to the user, however, a system like gksudo still has to identify an account -- say, root -- that does have the right to perform the privileged operation.
I fail to see how I have it backwards. I'm saying is there's nothing in the text of the claim that requires the authentication request to be handled by the operating system. I'm saying the claim is ambiguous enough that the patent might cover the invocation of gksudo by an application that requires greater privileges just as it would cover an invocation by the operating system. I've asked you to resolve this ambiguity by pointing to the proper section of the patent claim, but all you do in response is dance around the issue and provide nothing of substance. I shall take your reply as a "no, I can't point to the relevant section in the patent claims because it doesn't exist".
Slashdot Mirror
They're suing for copyright infringement as well as libel? Please tell me there's something more to the libel allegations than just the posting of the contract. Otherwise, they're either suing for libel over the posting of a legitimate document or suing for copyright infringement over a document they do not own.
As with catalog sales in the days before the Internet, Amazon.com is not required to collect taxes in any jurisdiction where it doesn't have a business presence. There's no trickery involved. Amazon doesn't collect any taxes it isn't required by law to collect, just like you don't pay taxes in states that you've never set foot in.
Since only the federal government can regulate interstate commerce, the ability of State X to force Amazon.com to collect its taxes when it doesn't have a presence in that state would require federal legislation to that effect. Also, for any such federal law to work it seems to me that tax rules and rates would have to be simplified across all 50 states. There's an effort to do so called the Streamlined Sales Tax Project, but despite its name it strikes me as ridiculously overcomplicated (as in "you need a certified computer program to handle the differences between each state's rules") due to the desire to please all the participating states.
LOL! Now how did I know some Slashdotter would mod me Troll for daring to criticize the US?
Amazing. Given US's kneejerk reactions to these kinds of events, is it at all surprising that more and more people are refusing to visit the United States for anything other than business purposes? These idiots either don't realize or don't care that overreaction does have its price.
Do you have a source for that?
Security is getting so ridiculous that I'm forced to wonder how long it will be until these people decide to ban passengers. No passengers -> no terrorists -> no victims.
I wonder how American proponents of such a principle would react to an American citizen being sued and convicted in China for posting information that China considers illegal to a US website that is nevertheless available to Chinese citizens.
Canada should not allow itself to be bullied into adopting bad copyright law. While the European Union appears quite eager to be as bad (or worse) than the United States in terms of harmful copyright legislation, I sincerely hope Canada will put its citizens interests above those of copyright holders. I'm not against globalization, but countries must sometimes defend their sovereignty for the sake of their citizens.
Sorry Slashdot, but I agree completely with Ted Alvin Klaudt. If I were Ted Alvin Klaudt and had been convicted, as Ted Alvin Klaudt was, of raping my foster daughters, I too would have scrambled for ways to prevent the media from commenting on my transgressions, just like Ted Alvin Klaudt is doing. Some may say employing copyright law in the manner of Ted Alvin Klaudt constitutes blatant abuse of the legal system, but I, as Ted Alvin Klaudt, feel otherwise. Ted Alvin Klaudt hasn't done anything wrong (with respect to the copyright thing, not the rape thing), and I wish him (Ted Alvin Klaudt) the best of luck.
Godspeed, Ted Alvin Klaudt. Godspeed.
On the issue of kids faking their birth date after being initially rejected, Game Politics said:
I responded:
We cannot altogether avoid our instincts, but we are certainly capable of doing better than our instincts in most situations. Policies borne out of paranoia aren't harmless, and besides are generally less effective than policies that are well thought out. "Think of the children" policies are usually knee-jerk reactions that are out of proportion to the actual threat. We shall not face the extinction of mankind for abandoning policies that address mostly imagined threats, but we are at risk of suffering serious negative side effects whenever people's irrational fears are allowed to influence the law to such a degree as is happening here.
This is not about standing proud in front of a charging lion (which both instinct and reason agree is a terrible idea), but about accepting and embracing the power of the mind to distinguish between real and imagined threats despite what our primitive instincts might tell us. Humans are capable of that to a significant degree, and it's actually a step forward in terms of evolution.
A society that concerns itself with real threats and doesn't waste time on irrational ones will be much better of than a paranoid society. The idea that humans will become extinct for not freaking out is itself irrational, and false.
In the US, if you are found not guilty during the original trial the verdict cannot be appealed.
The difference between humans and other animals is that humans are able to see beyond their biological instincts and consider things as they actually are. Perhaps humans are still too primitive to prevent their rational minds from being co-opted by irrational instinctive impulses, which is something I don't see as a sign of strength. Growth lies in the opposite direction, where factual concerns trump irrational and often harmful thoughts such as "let's assume adults who talk to children are all up to no good".
"Think of the children" belongs in the past. We should strive to outgrow it rather than let it take over our lives -- and our minds.
How many people are going to be arrested for asking children about their "personal interests or other innocuous topics" on the grounds that the person asking the questions might perhaps turn out to be a pedophile?
How do you establish the adult's intentions unless the adult has expressed a desire to commit an offense against the child, thus not requiring the broader interpretation of the law? The way the judge's decision is described, it would seem it isn't necessary to establish criminal intent, thus making people liable for conversations that are truly innocent.
There's often been an air of paranoia around many of the laws that are supposed to address the online victimization of children, but this one is about the most ridiculous I've seen. Idiots at the helm is all I can say.
Programmers rejected by Google can now tell their friends: "I didn't get the job. I must be too good for them."
The most ridiculous thing is the part where Mr. Lawyer claims that what a firefighter gets paid for "is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax." According to this guy's idea of fair compensation for firefighters, these people would be better off starting fires to drum up business on days when there's no fire, because apparently they're not really doing any work unless they're literally fighting fires.
"Your position was that Google should be able to scan the books (despite the authors' "exclusive rights") freely, search them and thus profit from them, just not display them. If that's your view, I don't see how you can feel that the class is betrayed by the settlement. Every single member of the class is better off than if Google hadn't been sued. At best, they get some money. At worst, they are exactly where they were before."
Scanning books for the purpose of making them searchable online could, ideally, be considered fair use. Displaying or selling full new copies of those books, on the other hand, would definitely not be considered fair use. There's no way Google could legally have gotten away with that before the settlement. The settlement granted Google a great deal more than it originally tried to grab for itself.
"Google gets "exclusive rights" to nothing."
Yes, I know. The author has exclusive rights under the law. The settlement doesn't transfer those rights to Google, but it does grant Google the right to exploit some of those otherwise exclusive rights. That's all I meant.
Except that Google isn't selling used books, but reprinting out-of-print books. The first sale doctrine does not apply to what Google is doing.
Copyright grants authors exclusive rights to their books for the entire length of the copyright term. This means Google is not allowed to sell out-of-print books without the author's permission, nor does it get to decide for how much the books are to be sold to them. The lawyers have betrayed the class by turning a lawsuit against Google into a settlement that benefits Google more than it benefits the class. The class was expecting a remedy, but instead they got their exclusive rights sold to Google under the terms of the settlement.
Perhaps it's true that the world would benefit from an orphaned works policy, but a class action lawsuit is not the proper place to set such policies. Orphaned works is a legislative issue, not to be settled for all authors through strategic class-action settlements.
While I'm totally on Google's side when it comes to scanning books -- with or without permission -- for the purposes of making them searchable online, I find it outrageous that a lawsuit designed to stop Google from doing that should end up granting them rights they wouldn't have enjoyed before the lawsuit. It feels like a betrayal of the class by a plaintiff with somewhat narrower interests than those of the parties actually represented by the class.
It would probably be more accurate to say that websites (not servers) are vulnerable to such an attack. After all, unless I've misread TFA, no code is actually being executed server side. Instead, what's happening is that any SWF's posted to a publicly-accessible location are being served under the server's domain and therefore any scripts in the SWF will execute with rights to access that domain. There's nothing the SWF can do through scripting that a visitor can't do directly, so depending on how you look at it you could say the server itself isn't vulnerable to this, but the website and the clients are.
This is part of the reason why I think government-funded Internet access is generally a bad idea. Governments are too trigger-happy with regard to avoiding liability, and are otherwise too censor-prone to properly deal with the significant responsibility of administering the local population's Internet connection.
Considering Apple's litigious nature and the fact that it once sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing on the MacOS "look and feel", I can easily see why Microsoft would want to distance itself from this guy's statements. Apple has always wanted to have exclusive rights over Mac-like graphical interfaces, damn the negative consequences to the rest of the industry.
This guy's statements are fodder for Apple's bloodthirsty lawyers. Should it turn out he's lying about Microsoft's intentions, firing him would seem to be the best course of action.
In Ubuntu, whenever I try to mount a drive but don't have the necessary privilege, I am presented with a list of users who do have such privilege and I am prompted pick a particular user and to provide that user's password. Even if no such list were presented to the user, however, a system like gksudo still has to identify an account -- say, root -- that does have the right to perform the privileged operation.
I fail to see how I have it backwards. I'm saying is there's nothing in the text of the claim that requires the authentication request to be handled by the operating system. I'm saying the claim is ambiguous enough that the patent might cover the invocation of gksudo by an application that requires greater privileges just as it would cover an invocation by the operating system. I've asked you to resolve this ambiguity by pointing to the proper section of the patent claim, but all you do in response is dance around the issue and provide nothing of substance. I shall take your reply as a "no, I can't point to the relevant section in the patent claims because it doesn't exist".