There's a very simple solution to this whole "filtering" debate: require adult oriented sites to note as much in some META or other tag, and have all filtering software check that tag.
Better still, flip it around: Let any site that wants to solicit children's attention identify itself with a META tag, and let the publisher of the site be on the hook if they publish indecent material. Browsers can be written that will only link to such sites, and parents who want to let their kids surf without monitoring can give their kids such a browser. The rest of us can be left alone.
A deficiency in my proposal is that it might put some publishers that have legitimate reasons for publishing to minors content with sexual and violent themes in a tight spot. Planned Parenthood (birth control and AIDS prevention info.) and Amnesty International (descriptions of human rights violations) come to mind. Nevertheless, I think it's best to start from the assumption that all sites are potentially harmful to children without parental supervision, and let anyone who wants to warrant their site as child-safe -- whatever that means -- do so at their own risk.
Results of roll call votes are available at the Library of Congress' Thomas site. This amendment passed by a voice vote, however, so the votes of individual members are not recorded.
The text of the amendment is not yet available online, but should be available within a day or two at this page (look for a reference to an entry in the Congressional Record printing the text of the Franks amendment).
The language comes from the federal Securities Exchange Act:
[I]n any private action arising under this chapter that is based on an untrue statement of a material fact or omission of a material fact necessary to make the statement not misleading [i.e., in almost every federal securities fraud lawsuit], a person... shall not be liable with respect to any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, if and to the extent that the forward-looking statement is identified as a forward-looking statement, and is accompanied by meaningful cautionary statements identifying important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statement...
Even though it cannot directly reproduce a digital music recording, the Rio would nevertheless be a digital audio recording device if it could reproduce a digital music recording "from a transmission."
17 U.S.C. 1001(1). [...] The Senate Report [on the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992] provides a radio broadcast as an example of a transmission. [...] The parties [dispute] whether indirect reproduction of a transmission of a digital music recording is covered by the Act. RIAA asserts that indirect reproduction of a transmission is sufficient for the Rio to fall within the Act's ambit as a digital audio recording device.
[...] [T]he Rio can indirectly reproduce a transmission. For example, if a radio broadcast of a digital audio recording were recorded on a [DAT] and then uploaded to a computer hard drive, the Rio could indirectly reproduce the transmission by downloading a copy from the hard drive. Thus, if indirect reproduction of a transmission falls within the statutory definition, the Rio would be a digital audio recording device.
RIAA's interpretation of the statutory language initially seems plausible, but closer analysis reveals that it is contrary to the statutory language and common sense. [...] RIAA's interpretation of the Act's language... would only cover the indirect recording of transmissions, and would omit restrictions on the direct recording of transmissions (e.g., recording songs from the radio) from the Act's ambit. [...] It makes little sense for the Act to restrict the indirect recording of transmissions, but to allow unrestricted direct recording of transmissions (e.g., to regulate second-hand recording of songs from the radio, but to allow unlimited direct recording of songs from the radio).
Here's an interesting footnote:
RIAA... predicts that losses to digital Internet piracy will soon surpass the $300 million that is allegedly lost annually to other more traditional forms of piracy.(1)
(1) Whether or not piracy causes such financial harm is a subject of dispute. Critics of the industry's piracy loss figures have noted that a willingness to download illicit files for free does not necessarily correlate to lost sales, for the simple reason that persons willing to accept an item for free often will not purchase the same item, even if no longer freely available. Critics further note that the price of commercially available recordings already reflects the existence of copying and the benefits and harms such copying causes; thus, they contend, the current price of recordings offsets, at least in part, the losses incurred by the industry from home taping and piracy. [Citations omitted.]
Again I ask, what constitutes Slander and Libel? False or Injurious statements is a broad category.
It's an and, not an or. It's completely permissible to make true and injurious comments ("Charles Manson is a murderer") or false and non-injurious comments ("Linus Torvalds is from Denmark").
Now I ask you two questions:
1) If the law says that what I've done is illegal, should I go to jail even though what I've said has been in the publics intrest?
To be clear, under U.S. law, you don't go to jail for D/S/L; it's a tort, not a crime. (A "tort" is something you do that someone can sue you for and collect damages if they win. Sometimes the same behavior can be both a crime and a tort; for example, homicide is a crime and wrongful death is a tort. Committing D/S/L isn't a crime, however, unless you commit D/S/L as part of some other crime.)
In the corporate practices example you give, you wouldn't be held liable if your statements were true, even though they may have been injurious. Note that corporations are often reluctant to sue for defamation, etc., even when they have actually been defamed, as the lawsuit often serves to publicize the defamatory statement, and because the defendant may be able to obtain through discovery documents which would further embarrass the corporation. (I understand that this is what happened when McDonalds sued some pamphleteers in the UK under the UK's more restrictive libel laws.)
2) If the law says that this particular scenario is legal, what is the differance between it and the Xircon case?
Presumably in the Xircon case the statements are alleged to be false, as opposed to your example where the statements are true.
Also note that employees of a company have a fiduciary duty to act in the company's best interest, though subject to public policy limitations (e.g., employees are generally not bound to keep quiet if the company is burying bodies in the basement). As I understand the Xircom poster asserted he was an employee, Xircom doubtless brought a claim against him for breach of fiduciary duty as well, which also supported the issuance of the subpoena.
Now for the final wizbang point of my post. The more we limit peoples right to speak out negativley (noise) an equal amount of important (signal) speech will be lost.
I'm not sure this proposition is self-evident in the case of the "right" to make false and injurious statements. Would you care to elaborate?
Under U.S. law, defamation/slander/libel == false and injurious statements of fact regarding a living person or entity.
[Important 1st Amendment qualification: If the person/entity is a public figure, a negligently-made statement can't be the basis of a D/S/L claim.]
Do you believe that there are not occasions when it is necessary?
Under what circumstances do you think it might be "necessary" to tell an injurious falsehood about someone? (This is a serious question, incidentally; if you have some theory of why the value of making such statements in certain cases outweighs the harm which would result if anyone were free to make such statements without fear of reprisal, I would genuinely be interested to hear it.)
While the overwhelming majority of the activities of today's federal government exceed its constitutional authority,...
To put this another way, if you hold that the the Supreme Court cases decided in the first half of this century that considered the extent of Congress' power to regulate "interstate commerce" were wrongly decided -- and there is a small but serious minority of legal scholars who so hold -- then you would conclude that the overwhelming majority of the activities of today's federal government exceed its constitutional authority. But no one should think that the courts "know" that the government is acting unconstitutionally all the time, but don't do anything about it.
also, It seems to me that the case could have been first removed to federal court on grounds of diversity of citizenship (unless the plea specifically asked for less damages than required for removal), then transferred to federal court in the defendant's home jurisdiction in Texas.
It was in federal court -- presumably by way of removal, as you suggest -- but I don't know what the grounds for transfer to Texas would be. Venue seems to lie in Virginia pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1391(a)(2). The doctrine of forum non conveniens (Lat., "The forum is not convenient") doesn't seem to be applicable, as the plaintiff lives there and at least some material events related to the case occurred in that district.
The "long arm" statute is only enforceable within VA.... Even if they want you, all you have to do is refuse to appear. The judge will issue a bench warrant and as long as you don't have to go to VA you're fine. One state's bench warrant doesn't have to be honored by any other.
(1) The entire point of a long-arm statute like this one is to subject nonresidents to jurisdiction. Subject to some constitutional limitations, they are enforceable.
(2) The judge will not issue a "bench warrant" if you don't appear to defend yourself in a civil case; he'll just rule that you automatically lose.
(3) If you don't show up and therefore lose, the plaintiff can get his judgment against you entered wherever you live (except for possibly the Cayman Islands or some such) and use it to go after your assets (house, car, bank account, etc.).
Some posters have suggested that these kind of statutes are new, or reflect American or Virginian overreaching. So far as I know, all jurisdictions -- you too, Canada! -- permit residents to sue nonresidents under some circumstances. The "long-arm jurisdiction" statute at issue here, Va. Code 8.01-328.1, is a pretty typical example. Here is the relevant provision of the Virginia long-arm statute:
A court may exercise personal jurisdiction over a person, who acts directly or by an agent, as to a cause of action arising from the person's:
3. Causing tortious injury by an act or omission in this Commonwealth . . ..
The judge in this case found jurisdiction under this provision on the ground that the defendants committed an "act" in Virginia by publishing on AOL's Virginia-based server. That's pretty questionable in and of itself, but what makes it even worse is that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been held to require that nonresidents have some certain level of "minimum contacts" with a state before they may be subject to that state's jurisdiction. It certainly seems questionable whether that standard was met here.
Incidentally, if you ignore a lawsuit against you in another jurisdiction as one poster has suggested -- "default" is the technical term -- the plaintiff can generally have the judgment entered in whatever jurisdiction you keep your wealth and use it to go after your assets there. (In particular, U.S. states are required by the Constitution to give the judgments of other state courts "full faith and credit.") A court will generally only refuse to enter the judgment where it is "repugnant to public policy" of the jurisdiction; for example, U.S. courts won't enter a British judgment if the underlying claim is a libel claim which would be barred by the First Amendment in this country.
In fact, the case was heard in federal court, under so-called "diversity" jurisdiction.
[In the U.S., federal courts may hear cases to be decided under state law if the parties are "diverse", i.e., if one party is a resident and the other parties are not (here, here, the plaintiff was a Virginia resident and the defendants were Texas residents). If you are sued in a court of a state you don't live in, and you want the case to be heard in federal court, you may "remove" the case to the federal court. The case has to meet a certain size cutoff (currently, at least $75K must be in dispute).]
If the court is convinced that the defendant told the truth, the plaintiff loses.
True, but note that the burden is on the plaintiff to prove falsity. If the plaintiff is unable to prove that, the defendant has no obligation to prove his story true.
If a "public figure" brings a libel suit, it's not enough to prove that the defendant made a false and damaging statment; the plaintiff must also prove that the defendant either acted with malice or had negligent disregard for whether or not the statement was true.
Close -- the key word isn't "negligent disregard," but "reckless disregard." Negligence can be mere sloppiness or laziness, whereas recklessness is sometimes equated to "gross negligence" or "willful blindness."
(For instance, if someone told me he saw the mayor of New York kill a man in broad daylight in downtown Boston on a particular date, it might be reckless to publish the story without further investigation given (1) the overwhelming likelihood that the story is false and (2) the fact that the story could easily be checked against the mayor's schedule, which is a matter of public record. It's a pretty demanding standard.)
I am increasingly impressed by the new German government, which seems to embody a lot of what some of us hoped Clinton/Gore might be back in '92 (market-oriented without being silly about it, pro-civil-liberties, appropriately concerned about the environment and international human rights issues, etc.).
Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine had an interesting article about Joschka Fischer, the formerly radical politician who is now the German foreign minister. It's worth checking out, particularly for Americans who are generally deprived of any news about the day-to-day political life of other industrial democracies.
From a libertarian free-market-absolutist standpoint(*), there's no problem with such licenses as long as you can reject the license and obtain a refund as soon as you have an opportunity to read the terms. Alternatively, such licenses would be OK as long as manufacturers could put on the box a binding statement that the consumer will not be bound by any license terms not disclosed on the box, and customers could avoid software not bearing that statement.
What contracts can't you make? I can't agree to work for less than the minimum wage. I can't agree to rent an apartment without hot water. I can't agree to sell my organs. Putting it another way, while I might agree to do these things, I can't be held to that agreement.
What are the default terms? If I agree to paint your house, but we don't set a time for doing it, and you sue me when I don't do it, I can't avoid the lawsuit by saying I'll paint your house in the year 2019. The court will say that the parties understood that I would do the job in a reasonable time (perhaps a month). In cases like this, where the parties don't address a particular point in their agreement, the law will generally supply a default term in order to make the contract enforceable.
Keeping the foregoing in mind, this proposed law does the following things: (1) It tells you what kind of software licenses you can't agree to -- and by the sound of it, not very much is out of bounds. (2) It tells you what the default terms will be when a license doesn't fill everything in.
The suggestion that this proposal represents some sort of government intrustion into the software maker/consumer relationship doesn't seem fair. Under this law, every consumer gets enough rope to hang themselves with; there's very little that's prohibited. As for the default terms, you're free to contract around them if you don't like them. By libertarian lights, this law is -- if anything -- too slanted in favor of consumers.
(That doesn't mean it's a good law, of course; it just means that if you consider yourself an anti-government sort, you should understand what this proposed law would[n't] do.)
There's no doubt but that the question of the ultimate reality of the world in which we live is an ancient question, one which is addressed by the philosophical traditions of many different cultures. (Cf. Ep. St. James 4.15 (Douay-Rheims): "For what is your life? It is a vapour which appeareth for a little while, and afterwards shall vanish away.")
Until Descartes, however, this question had been posed as one of metaphysics. Is this the world that matters, or is there some other "world" (e.g., the Christian Heaven, Plato's realm of the ideals) which is the world of real significance?
Descartes' innovation was to investigate the idea of "knowing" and the philosophical limitations on our capacity to know. This is the theme of (at least the first part of) The Matrix: How does Neo know whether what is happening to him is real or an illusion?
(For those who are interested, Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty is a major contribution to this area of philosophy which is surprisingly easy to read once you get into it. Six degrees of geek separation: Wittgenstein and Alan Turing were contemporaries at Cambridge.)
The second Idea [in "The Matrix"], that the world around you is fake, Has also been done a few times in sci-fi, though not as often as the AI thing. However it is based (stolen) on one of Socrates thought experiments, and for the geeks of the world, it is also not a new concept. But for all the non-geeks, and proto-geeks out there, this is world-shattering strangeness.
The philosophical antecedent for The Matrix is really the work of the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes:
I will suppose, then, . . . that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, viz, [suspend my judgment], and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false, and being imposed upon by this deceiver, whatever be his power and artifice.
Plato's story of the cave ( Republic, Book VII) is with the nature of things (ontology); Descartes' concern is rather with how we know what we thing we know (epistemology), which is the concern of The Matrix. (Granted, if you can draw a clear line dividing ontology from epistemology, you win a philosophy Ph.D., but the distinction is generally serviceable.)
I don't think it's necessary that a film's ideas be wholly original, but it's necessary that the film present those ideas in a new way. The idea that aliens might long ago have visited the earth long predates 2001, but the image of ape-men inspecting a black monolith does not. The Matrix was successful because it presented its themes in a new and visually stunning way.
If you really want to see oppression, go to Kosovo, or China, or an Arabian country. THEN come back and tell me how bad you have it in America.
Is there a counterpart to Godwin's Law which describes cases in which a legitimate complaint is dismissed as trivial by comparison with Auschwitz/the Gulag/life under the Taliban (pick one or more)? If there isn't, there should be.
Has anyone considered bringing an action in federal court against the relevant federal agencies seeking a declaratory judgment that such monitoring constitutes an illegal search in violation of the Fourth Amendment?
Does anyone know of some legal reason why such an action could not be brought?
When an argument begs A question, then it's meant that it requires that a question be asked of it (which could also be said of a fallacious argument).... It's common usage with technical accuracy to back it up.... It was common use before academia picked it up.
This is not correct. "Begging the question" is a rough translation of the Latin "petitio principii," a venerable term which refers to the logical fallacy referenced above. The common use of "begs the question" to mean "suggests the question" is erroneous. There is nothing "technically accurate" about that usage, and academia did not "pick [the term] up" from common usage -- quite the reverse.
That's a little strongly put -- or more than a little -- but I must confess that I myself am irritated to see the same errors come up again and again in Slashdot. In particular:
"definately" (Is the sideways-eight "infinaty"?)
"grammer" (TV's Frasier, I suppose)
"Your" for "you are" (I cringe on behalf of the mothers of the people who write, "Your an idiot")
Idea: While I wouldn't suggest overloading/.'s servers even further with a full-blown spell-checker or grammar-checker, would it be feasible to quickly check for the top 10 or so misspellings, and dump posts containing those strings into a "Do you really want to post this?" dialog?
[Lucas] has had no hand in the marketing, besides the release date, or the liscensing of the rights. That is done by a bunch of money grubbing lawyers.
To be clear, Lucas is a billionaire. His lawyers do what he tells them to do, not vice versa. If you want to believe his "shucks-all-this-fuss-about-my-lil'-ol'-film" line, be my guest.
Katz with all the promotion you've done for your book, don't you think all of this falls under the same heading? Didn't you, *gasp*, do a book tour to prop[a]gate your ideas?
It's one thing to try to sell a book, film, etc. by giving interviews, permitting excerpts to be republished, etc., but it's quite another to use the work to market other stuff. What Lucas is doing -- using his product to sell fried food and plastic junk -- is what Katz would be doing if he marketed Katz-Korp Kozy Mountaintop Kabins(tm) to people who had purchased his book.
K surely isn't saying that L doesn't have the legal right to squeeze every last marketing dollar out of his product if he wants to do that. K's point, if I read K correctly, is that by choosing to do that, L is making a pretty strong statement about how seriously he takes his work product, a statement which counts for a lot more than the mytho-religious Campbellian claptrap he'll spout for Charlie Rose or Barbara Walters or whomever.
(I suppose I could rationalize the toy thing as follows: If L tried to limit toy sales at all, the entire output would be snapped up as collectors items. While I am not the biggest fan of tie-in toys for kids, if an eight-year-old kid wants a Jar-Jar action figure, he should be able to have it for a few bucks.)
Slashdot Mirror
Better still, flip it around: Let any site that wants to solicit children's attention identify itself with a META tag, and let the publisher of the site be on the hook if they publish indecent material. Browsers can be written that will only link to such sites, and parents who want to let their kids surf without monitoring can give their kids such a browser. The rest of us can be left alone.
A deficiency in my proposal is that it might put some publishers that have legitimate reasons for publishing to minors content with sexual and violent themes in a tight spot. Planned Parenthood (birth control and AIDS prevention info.) and Amnesty International (descriptions of human rights violations) come to mind. Nevertheless, I think it's best to start from the assumption that all sites are potentially harmful to children without parental supervision, and let anyone who wants to warrant their site as child-safe -- whatever that means -- do so at their own risk.
The text of the amendment is not yet available online, but should be available within a day or two at this page (look for a reference to an entry in the Congressional Record printing the text of the Franks amendment).
Here's what I think is the core of the decision:
Here's an interesting footnote:
Generally a pretty clueful opinion, IMHO.
It's an and, not an or. It's completely permissible to make true and injurious comments ("Charles Manson is a murderer") or false and non-injurious comments ("Linus Torvalds is from Denmark").
Now I ask you two questions:
1) If the law says that what I've done is illegal, should I go to jail even though what I've said has been in the publics intrest?
To be clear, under U.S. law, you don't go to jail for D/S/L; it's a tort, not a crime. (A "tort" is something you do that someone can sue you for and collect damages if they win. Sometimes the same behavior can be both a crime and a tort; for example, homicide is a crime and wrongful death is a tort. Committing D/S/L isn't a crime, however, unless you commit D/S/L as part of some other crime.)
In the corporate practices example you give, you wouldn't be held liable if your statements were true, even though they may have been injurious. Note that corporations are often reluctant to sue for defamation, etc., even when they have actually been defamed, as the lawsuit often serves to publicize the defamatory statement, and because the defendant may be able to obtain through discovery documents which would further embarrass the corporation. (I understand that this is what happened when McDonalds sued some pamphleteers in the UK under the UK's more restrictive libel laws.)
2) If the law says that this particular scenario is legal, what is the differance between it and the Xircon case?
Presumably in the Xircon case the statements are alleged to be false, as opposed to your example where the statements are true.
Also note that employees of a company have a fiduciary duty to act in the company's best interest, though subject to public policy limitations (e.g., employees are generally not bound to keep quiet if the company is burying bodies in the basement). As I understand the Xircom poster asserted he was an employee, Xircom doubtless brought a claim against him for breach of fiduciary duty as well, which also supported the issuance of the subpoena.
Now for the final wizbang point of my post. The more we limit peoples right to speak out negativley (noise) an equal amount of important (signal) speech will be lost.
I'm not sure this proposition is self-evident in the case of the "right" to make false and injurious statements. Would you care to elaborate?
Under U.S. law, defamation/slander/libel == false and injurious statements of fact regarding a living person or entity.
[Important 1st Amendment qualification: If the person/entity is a public figure, a negligently-made statement can't be the basis of a D/S/L claim.]
Do you believe that there are not occasions when it is necessary?
Under what circumstances do you think it might be "necessary" to tell an injurious falsehood about someone? (This is a serious question, incidentally; if you have some theory of why the value of making such statements in certain cases outweighs the harm which would result if anyone were free to make such statements without fear of reprisal, I would genuinely be interested to hear it.)
To put this another way, if you hold that the the Supreme Court cases decided in the first half of this century that considered the extent of Congress' power to regulate "interstate commerce" were wrongly decided -- and there is a small but serious minority of legal scholars who so hold -- then you would conclude that the overwhelming majority of the activities of today's federal government exceed its constitutional authority. But no one should think that the courts "know" that the government is acting unconstitutionally all the time, but don't do anything about it.
also, It seems to me that the case could have been first removed to federal court on grounds of diversity of citizenship (unless the plea specifically asked for less damages than required for removal), then transferred to federal court in the defendant's home jurisdiction in Texas.
It was in federal court -- presumably by way of removal, as you suggest -- but I don't know what the grounds for transfer to Texas would be. Venue seems to lie in Virginia pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1391(a)(2). The doctrine of forum non conveniens (Lat., "The forum is not convenient") doesn't seem to be applicable, as the plaintiff lives there and at least some material events related to the case occurred in that district.
(1) The entire point of a long-arm statute like this one is to subject nonresidents to jurisdiction. Subject to some constitutional limitations, they are enforceable.
(2) The judge will not issue a "bench warrant" if you don't appear to defend yourself in a civil case; he'll just rule that you automatically lose.
(3) If you don't show up and therefore lose, the plaintiff can get his judgment against you entered wherever you live (except for possibly the Cayman Islands or some such) and use it to go after your assets (house, car, bank account, etc.).
The judge in this case found jurisdiction under this provision on the ground that the defendants committed an "act" in Virginia by publishing on AOL's Virginia-based server. That's pretty questionable in and of itself, but what makes it even worse is that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been held to require that nonresidents have some certain level of "minimum contacts" with a state before they may be subject to that state's jurisdiction. It certainly seems questionable whether that standard was met here.
Incidentally, if you ignore a lawsuit against you in another jurisdiction as one poster has suggested -- "default" is the technical term -- the plaintiff can generally have the judgment entered in whatever jurisdiction you keep your wealth and use it to go after your assets there. (In particular, U.S. states are required by the Constitution to give the judgments of other state courts "full faith and credit.") A court will generally only refuse to enter the judgment where it is "repugnant to public policy" of the jurisdiction; for example, U.S. courts won't enter a British judgment if the underlying claim is a libel claim which would be barred by the First Amendment in this country.
[In the U.S., federal courts may hear cases to be decided under state law if the parties are "diverse", i.e., if one party is a resident and the other parties are not (here, here, the plaintiff was a Virginia resident and the defendants were Texas residents). If you are sued in a court of a state you don't live in, and you want the case to be heard in federal court, you may "remove" the case to the federal court. The case has to meet a certain size cutoff (currently, at least $75K must be in dispute).]
True, but note that the burden is on the plaintiff to prove falsity. If the plaintiff is unable to prove that, the defendant has no obligation to prove his story true.
If a "public figure" brings a libel suit, it's not enough to prove that the defendant made a false and damaging statment; the plaintiff must also prove that the defendant either acted with malice or had negligent disregard for whether or not the statement was true.
Close -- the key word isn't "negligent disregard," but "reckless disregard." Negligence can be mere sloppiness or laziness, whereas recklessness is sometimes equated to "gross negligence" or "willful blindness."
(For instance, if someone told me he saw the mayor of New York kill a man in broad daylight in downtown Boston on a particular date, it might be reckless to publish the story without further investigation given (1) the overwhelming likelihood that the story is false and (2) the fact that the story could easily be checked against the mayor's schedule, which is a matter of public record. It's a pretty demanding standard.)
Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine had an interesting article about Joschka Fischer, the formerly radical politician who is now the German foreign minister. It's worth checking out, particularly for Americans who are generally deprived of any news about the day-to-day political life of other industrial democracies.
(* Which I don't necessarily endorse.)
What contracts can't you make? I can't agree to work for less than the minimum wage. I can't agree to rent an apartment without hot water. I can't agree to sell my organs. Putting it another way, while I might agree to do these things, I can't be held to that agreement.
What are the default terms? If I agree to paint your house, but we don't set a time for doing it, and you sue me when I don't do it, I can't avoid the lawsuit by saying I'll paint your house in the year 2019. The court will say that the parties understood that I would do the job in a reasonable time (perhaps a month). In cases like this, where the parties don't address a particular point in their agreement, the law will generally supply a default term in order to make the contract enforceable.Keeping the foregoing in mind, this proposed law does the following things: (1) It tells you what kind of software licenses you can't agree to -- and by the sound of it, not very much is out of bounds. (2) It tells you what the default terms will be when a license doesn't fill everything in.
The suggestion that this proposal represents some sort of government intrustion into the software maker/consumer relationship doesn't seem fair. Under this law, every consumer gets enough rope to hang themselves with; there's very little that's prohibited. As for the default terms, you're free to contract around them if you don't like them. By libertarian lights, this law is -- if anything -- too slanted in favor of consumers.
(That doesn't mean it's a good law, of course; it just means that if you consider yourself an anti-government sort, you should understand what this proposed law would[n't] do.)
It's quite clear from the document linked above that the lawsuit is being settled.
Until Descartes, however, this question had been posed as one of metaphysics. Is this the world that matters, or is there some other "world" (e.g., the Christian Heaven, Plato's realm of the ideals) which is the world of real significance?
Descartes' innovation was to investigate the idea of "knowing" and the philosophical limitations on our capacity to know. This is the theme of (at least the first part of) The Matrix: How does Neo know whether what is happening to him is real or an illusion?
(For those who are interested, Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty is a major contribution to this area of philosophy which is surprisingly easy to read once you get into it. Six degrees of geek separation: Wittgenstein and Alan Turing were contemporaries at Cambridge.)
Here at /., I would suppose that a gopher URL counts as "kickin' it old school."
Shouts to all my homies. Peace out.
The philosophical antecedent for The Matrix is really the work of the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes:
Meditations on First Philosophy I.12 (Veitch trans. 1901).Plato's story of the cave ( Republic, Book VII) is with the nature of things (ontology); Descartes' concern is rather with how we know what we thing we know (epistemology), which is the concern of The Matrix. (Granted, if you can draw a clear line dividing ontology from epistemology, you win a philosophy Ph.D., but the distinction is generally serviceable.)
I don't think it's necessary that a film's ideas be wholly original, but it's necessary that the film present those ideas in a new way. The idea that aliens might long ago have visited the earth long predates 2001, but the image of ape-men inspecting a black monolith does not. The Matrix was successful because it presented its themes in a new and visually stunning way.
Is there a counterpart to Godwin's Law which describes cases in which a legitimate complaint is dismissed as trivial by comparison with Auschwitz/the Gulag/life under the Taliban (pick one or more)? If there isn't, there should be.
Has anyone considered bringing an action in federal court against the relevant federal agencies seeking a declaratory judgment that such monitoring constitutes an illegal search in violation of the Fourth Amendment?
Does anyone know of some legal reason why such an action could not be brought?
This is not correct. "Begging the question" is a rough translation of the Latin "petitio principii," a venerable term which refers to the logical fallacy referenced above. The common use of "begs the question" to mean "suggests the question" is erroneous. There is nothing "technically accurate" about that usage, and academia did not "pick [the term] up" from common usage -- quite the reverse.
- "definately" (Is the sideways-eight "infinaty"?)
- "grammer" (TV's Frasier, I suppose)
- "Your" for "you are" (I cringe on behalf of the mothers of the people who write, "Your an idiot")
Idea: While I wouldn't suggest overloadingI think such stickers might be illegal in Alabama and several other states.
To be clear, Lucas is a billionaire. His lawyers do what he tells them to do, not vice versa. If you want to believe his "shucks-all-this-fuss-about-my-lil'-ol'-film" line, be my guest.
It's one thing to try to sell a book, film, etc. by giving interviews, permitting excerpts to be republished, etc., but it's quite another to use the work to market other stuff. What Lucas is doing -- using his product to sell fried food and plastic junk -- is what Katz would be doing if he marketed Katz-Korp Kozy Mountaintop Kabins(tm) to people who had purchased his book.
K surely isn't saying that L doesn't have the legal right to squeeze every last marketing dollar out of his product if he wants to do that. K's point, if I read K correctly, is that by choosing to do that, L is making a pretty strong statement about how seriously he takes his work product, a statement which counts for a lot more than the mytho-religious Campbellian claptrap he'll spout for Charlie Rose or Barbara Walters or whomever.
(I suppose I could rationalize the toy thing as follows: If L tried to limit toy sales at all, the entire output would be snapped up as collectors items. While I am not the biggest fan of tie-in toys for kids, if an eight-year-old kid wants a Jar-Jar action figure, he should be able to have it for a few bucks.)