on trademark law. You need to start reading up on everything there is to know about trademarks and domain names. There's a lot of material available - I hope you have some free time to kill.
You'll want to start with the Domain Name Rights Coalition, which has a lot of good information, including a page about your rights (more specifically, the trademark holder's rights - you have no rights) under Network Solutions' trademark policies. If you pass those tests (which I believe you do, unless Purdue has a trademark on Purdue Online which predates your domain registration), you're in much better shape - NSI won't automatically shut you down. Purdue always has the option of filing suit, you see, but under certain circumstances NSI will take action preemptively against you and you'll lose without ever entering court.
Read your domain name registration agreement!
Of course, Purdue's case in court is weak. It cost them almost nothing to send this demand letter; if you knuckle under, that's a nice domain name for them with almost zero expenditure. They don't have a right to possess all domain names with Purdue in them, any more than Frank-the-chicken-guy does. You aren't attempting to extort money out of them (at least I hope not), you're providing your own independent, ongoing service. You're not attempting to confuse visitors into believing that Purdue runs the site. All of these factors are important. Read up on the criteria for actually infringing someone's trademark, like I said earlier, and send the nice lawyers a letter indicating that you know your rights and stand by them. Send them a list of all the other domain names with the string "purdue" in them - there are several sites which offer wildcard domain name searching. Don't offer to sell them the domain name. If you want to sell, you must retain a lawyer for that.
And take the time to write up some webpages about the situation and post them on purdueonline.com. Inform the school newspaper and local papers that Purdue is trying to hijack your domain name. Publicity is never a bad thing when you're in the right.
UK libel laws do act to ban free speech, because in the UK, truth is not a defense to libel. For example, if I say, "You're a bastard", and you were in fact born to an unmarried woman, there is no possibility of libel in the U.S. because I spoke the truth - an absolute defense. In the U.K., I can still be sued and lose, because, though I spoke the truth, my speech still tended to defame your character.
In fact, "true" libel receives harsher punishments than "false" libel for the very fact that it is true makes it more strongly defamatory. This allows public figures to sue any time they receive harsh, yet true, criticism of their public actions, and therefore discourage people from criticizing their government.
The UK and U.S. libel laws are very, very different. Do not confuse them. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I can't take credit for it. CWD is written by Meeks, Koch, McCullagh and whoever else happens to be writing - often scooping - a particular issue. The tone is... interesting, true, but you have to be able to get into it. It is, fundamentally, opinionated writing, and that makes it interesting in these days of bland and more bland. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
One possible solution, which requires no additional software, is to change the permissions on the file where the cookies are stored on your drive (cookies.txt for Netscape) to read-only - then edit it and remove all the cookies except those from the one site you visit. You'll still get and send cookies from other sites, but they will never be written to the drive and thus won't last beyond a single session - no long-term tracking. And the cookies from your one site will be available for the long term (until whenever the expiration date is, possibly years in the future).
This eliminates the most objectionable aspects of cookies without producing any noticeable downside or loss of functionality. Some people want to get serious and eliminate all cookies, but this makes it quite difficult to participate in any sort of online commerce, which can be a hassle.
Fair enough. Supporting the Web Consortium is a worthy idea; it's hard to believe all but a handful of those reading this review on Slashdot would disagree.
I hope a lot of people will disagree. The World Wide Web Consortium, despite its grandiose name, is nothing but an industry group of the largest, most powerful internet companies, which does its utmost to make all decisions and collaboration completely opaque to the internet community. If there is anyone in the whole world who least needs "support", it is IBM, AT&T, MCI/Worldcom, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, etc. etc.
Berners-Lee's primary fear is "Balkanization"; his primary solution to that is PICS, which promises to censor the internet to such an extent that no one will be offended by any part of it (and thus it can all stay together in one big interconnected lump). This is, of course, total crap: network effects make being connected to the primary Internet so much more useful than only having a slice of it that people with proprietary networks (AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, lots and lots of others) have fallen over themselves rushing to connect - and now they are essentially all connected, in one fashion or another, and I predict that it will never split - it's simply too valuable to be interoperable with the other 99% of the Internet to split off. Berners-Lee's "fear" is nothing but a red herring.
Berners-Lee's other work primarily includes those protocols which are deemed to be most profitable to the aforementioned internet giants. The P3P protocol, for example, is a standard for forcing all web visitors to disclose their name, SSN and checking account number to every website they visit - imagine the profits! W3C has long passed out of the time when it was useful to web development. Today, it's a closed group of industry execs who meet to find ways to make the WWW more profitable, not more useful or more informative or better. They're responsible for the most dangerous threat to free speech, PICS, and the most dangerous threat to privacy, P3P. Why in the world would anyone want to support them?
Note that this is all about "copyrighting" facts. Copyright currently protects the expression of an idea, the exact words you used to express it. This bill would allow the protection of basic facts of life. If, for example, you compiled a database of what the rainfall for Washington, D.C. was every day, and anybody else anywhere published the rainfall for D.C., even if they gathered the information independently, you could sue them - and win - because you had "protected" that information in your "hard-earned" database and they had "stolen" it.
Official sports scores are tallied by the official league scorekeepers. Unofficial ones are tallied by whoever is watching the game. Nobody would be able to legally report sports scores without permission from (and payment to) the league, even if they tallied it themselves, because these facts are part of a giant "Sports Score Database".
In other words: if this passes, you can prevent anyone from publishing FACTS about the history of the world, expressed in any manner, as long as you collect those facts into your database. Sports scores. Court decisions. Scientific data. Natural phenomena. Time of sunrise. High tide. Your medical history. Anything that can be expressed as a collection of data, you can legally be prevented from saying or publishing if someone with more money and more lawyers than you gets there first. The first person to publish the periodic chart of the elements gets to prevent everyone else from publishing this database of facts - no joke. What's hydrogen's atomic weight? Sorry, can't tell you unless you pay a fee to the database owner.
This is a radical, radical departure from previous law, which protected expressions rather than facts. It is being pushed by the biggest database owners in the world, who see fantastic profits behind it. If this passes, my god! Forget buying stock in Andover.net, run out and buy stock in Reed-Elsevier, world's largest scientific publisher. They will own science.
-- Michael Sims
Re:Ratings are always censorship
on
Three on Munich
·
· Score: 1
Companies with the bucks to lobby and/or work with the oversight agency can get lower ratings, thus increasing their audiences.
Note that this is already built into the proposed plan. First "news" sites, with what is news and what is not to be determined by a ratings board, would get a special news exemption. Second, there would be a special "white list" of sites not to be blocked. Of course, both of these lists will be full of mainstream, corporate news sites and alternative press and alternative views will be censored.
Marginalization for alternatives to the mainstream press is already built in. Why do you think they support it?
Scanners come in several flavors. What you want are decoded, keyboard-wedge scanners. These interpose themselves between the keyboard and the keyboard port, and when they scan something, they insert the characters just as if they had been typed on the keyboard. The system shouldn't be able to tell the difference between characters produced by scanning and characters produced by typing, so there's no question of OS-related problems.
Other scanners connect to the serial port and require specialized software to take the input from that port and insert it into your application. You'll want to avoid these in most cases - especially if such software doesn't exist for Linux.:)
Oh, and one more thing: Symbol is the largest producer of scanners in the world, and according to an engineer friend of mine who works there, they put a lot more into quality-control than other companies. Their scanners are often available at discounts of 50% or more off list price (because list price is horribly inflated), so shop around for your reseller and find a good price, but buy a Symbol scanner in the end.
The fourth link at the top is NOT EPIC's analysis of the bill.
Good catch. Sorry, my fault - I've taken a few too many anti-histamines this morning. It's fixed now. If/when EPIC does come out with a comprehensive analysis of the bill, slashdot will know.
For more information about UCITA and what it will do to the software industry, check out badsoftware.com, run by Cem Kaner, a lawyer and computer programmer. It is very bad, much worse than the press article slashdot linked to described. Imagine if you were a lobbyist for a company and you had complete and total freedom to rewrite the laws your company worked under. You'd write the laws to give you all the power and screw everyone else, right? This is what has happened with UCITA. If you have anything to do with software (and why the hell are you reading slashdot if you don't), you need to pay attention to this.
People are missing the entire point here (which is what Dyson wanted you to do, but...). In a nutshell, Esther Dyson and ICANN are doing a number of things to set major policies for the entire internet so that they will favor mega-corporations and totally exclude individuals from any participation in governing the internet. They're levying taxes, setting trademark policies, etc., while operating behind closed doors without individual input. The issue is rather complicated, too complicated for the amount of time and space I have here - do some research, as many, many people have protested ICANN's actions.
The letter which prompted Dyson's response was an accusation from two consumer advocates about ICANN's current policies. (See jya.com for Dyson's response, the original letter, and a parody response to Dyson.) Dyson's response, instead of making any real consideration of the issues, was to blow a lot of smoke and essentially blame NSI for all the bad things that have ever occurred in the history of the world.
Now, NSI is attempting to stake a claim on the.com DNS system, no doubt about it. And they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. But most of the things which Dyson blamed on NSI are actually ICANN's - Dyson's - fault. ICANN is responsible for not opening up the.com registry to competition, not NSI. ICANN is responsible for approving trademark rules which will allow any company to unilaterally take away domain names from individuals without even having to notify them in advance that the name is being challenged. Etc., etc.
Don't fall for Dyson's misleading letter. Corporations see the internet as a tremendous source of income, if only they can establish sufficient control over it (which means keeping governments and individuals from having any input). ICANN is giving away the store to them instead of setting up democratic means of governance. NSI is attacking.com/.org/.net. ICANN's actions will affect the entire internet, DNS, IP allocation, everything. Which one is the greater threat?
Looks like your company firewall is using Smartfilter. Of course, censorware.org is banned under "Criminal Skills". Try the sltrib.com site, they posted a copy of the report there.
Slashdot Mirror
on trademark law. You need to start reading up on everything there is to know about trademarks and domain names. There's a lot of material available - I hope you have some free time to kill.
You'll want to start with the Domain Name Rights Coalition, which has a lot of good information, including a page about your rights (more specifically, the trademark holder's rights - you have no rights) under Network Solutions' trademark policies. If you pass those tests (which I believe you do, unless Purdue has a trademark on Purdue Online which predates your domain registration), you're in much better shape - NSI won't automatically shut you down. Purdue always has the option of filing suit, you see, but under certain circumstances NSI will take action preemptively against you and you'll lose without ever entering court.
Read your domain name registration agreement!
Of course, Purdue's case in court is weak. It cost them almost nothing to send this demand letter; if you knuckle under, that's a nice domain name for them with almost zero expenditure. They don't have a right to possess all domain names with Purdue in them, any more than Frank-the-chicken-guy does. You aren't attempting to extort money out of them (at least I hope not), you're providing your own independent, ongoing service. You're not attempting to confuse visitors into believing that Purdue runs the site. All of these factors are important. Read up on the criteria for actually infringing someone's trademark, like I said earlier, and send the nice lawyers a letter indicating that you know your rights and stand by them. Send them a list of all the other domain names with the string "purdue" in them - there are several sites which offer wildcard domain name searching. Don't offer to sell them the domain name. If you want to sell, you must retain a lawyer for that.
And take the time to write up some webpages about the situation and post them on purdueonline.com. Inform the school newspaper and local papers that Purdue is trying to hijack your domain name. Publicity is never a bad thing when you're in the right.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
UK libel laws do act to ban free speech, because in the UK, truth is not a defense to libel. For example, if I say, "You're a bastard", and you were in fact born to an unmarried woman, there is no possibility of libel in the U.S. because I spoke the truth - an absolute defense. In the U.K., I can still be sued and lose, because, though I spoke the truth, my speech still tended to defame your character.
In fact, "true" libel receives harsher punishments than "false" libel for the very fact that it is true makes it more strongly defamatory. This allows public figures to sue any time they receive harsh, yet true, criticism of their public actions, and therefore discourage people from criticizing their government.
The UK and U.S. libel laws are very, very different. Do not confuse them.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I can't take credit for it. CWD is written by Meeks, Koch, McCullagh and whoever else happens to be writing - often scooping - a particular issue. The tone is... interesting, true, but you have to be able to get into it. It is, fundamentally, opinionated writing, and that makes it interesting in these days of bland and more bland.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
One possible solution, which requires no additional software, is to change the permissions on the file where the cookies are stored on your drive (cookies.txt for Netscape) to read-only - then edit it and remove all the cookies except those from the one site you visit. You'll still get and send cookies from other sites, but they will never be written to the drive and thus won't last beyond a single session - no long-term tracking. And the cookies from your one site will be available for the long term (until whenever the expiration date is, possibly years in the future).
This eliminates the most objectionable aspects of cookies without producing any noticeable downside or loss of functionality. Some people want to get serious and eliminate all cookies, but this makes it quite difficult to participate in any sort of online commerce, which can be a hassle.
--
Michael Sims
Fair enough. Supporting the Web Consortium is a worthy idea; it's hard to believe all but a handful of those reading this review on Slashdot would disagree.
I hope a lot of people will disagree. The World Wide Web Consortium, despite its grandiose name, is nothing but an industry group of the largest, most powerful internet companies, which does its utmost to make all decisions and collaboration completely opaque to the internet community. If there is anyone in the whole world who least needs "support", it is IBM, AT&T, MCI/Worldcom, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, etc. etc.
Berners-Lee's primary fear is "Balkanization"; his primary solution to that is PICS, which promises to censor the internet to such an extent that no one will be offended by any part of it (and thus it can all stay together in one big interconnected lump). This is, of course, total crap: network effects make being connected to the primary Internet so much more useful than only having a slice of it that people with proprietary networks (AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, lots and lots of others) have fallen over themselves rushing to connect - and now they are essentially all connected, in one fashion or another, and I predict that it will never split - it's simply too valuable to be interoperable with the other 99% of the Internet to split off. Berners-Lee's "fear" is nothing but a red herring.
Berners-Lee's other work primarily includes those protocols which are deemed to be most profitable to the aforementioned internet giants. The P3P protocol, for example, is a standard for forcing all web visitors to disclose their name, SSN and checking account number to every website they visit - imagine the profits! W3C has long passed out of the time when it was useful to web development. Today, it's a closed group of industry execs who meet to find ways to make the WWW more profitable, not more useful or more informative or better. They're responsible for the most dangerous threat to free speech, PICS, and the most dangerous threat to privacy, P3P. Why in the world would anyone want to support them?
--
Michael Sims
Note that this is all about "copyrighting" facts. Copyright currently protects the expression of an idea, the exact words you used to express it. This bill would allow the protection of basic facts of life. If, for example, you compiled a database of what the rainfall for Washington, D.C. was every day, and anybody else anywhere published the rainfall for D.C., even if they gathered the information independently, you could sue them - and win - because you had "protected" that information in your "hard-earned" database and they had "stolen" it.
Official sports scores are tallied by the official league scorekeepers. Unofficial ones are tallied by whoever is watching the game. Nobody would be able to legally report sports scores without permission from (and payment to) the league, even if they tallied it themselves, because these facts are part of a giant "Sports Score Database".
In other words: if this passes, you can prevent anyone from publishing FACTS about the history of the world, expressed in any manner, as long as you collect those facts into your database. Sports scores. Court decisions. Scientific data. Natural phenomena. Time of sunrise. High tide. Your medical history. Anything that can be expressed as a collection of data, you can legally be prevented from saying or publishing if someone with more money and more lawyers than you gets there first. The first person to publish the periodic chart of the elements gets to prevent everyone else from publishing this database of facts - no joke. What's hydrogen's atomic weight? Sorry, can't tell you unless you pay a fee to the database owner.
This is a radical, radical departure from previous law, which protected expressions rather than facts. It is being pushed by the biggest database owners in the world, who see fantastic profits behind it. If this passes, my god! Forget buying stock in Andover.net, run out and buy stock in Reed-Elsevier, world's largest scientific publisher. They will own science.
--
Michael Sims
Companies with the bucks to lobby and/or work with the oversight agency can get lower ratings, thus increasing their audiences.
Note that this is already built into the proposed plan. First "news" sites, with what is news and what is not to be determined by a ratings board, would get a special news exemption. Second, there would be a special "white list" of sites not to be blocked. Of course, both of these lists will be full of mainstream, corporate news sites and alternative press and alternative views will be censored.
Marginalization for alternatives to the mainstream press is already built in. Why do you think they support it?
--
Michael Sims
Scanners come in several flavors. What you want are decoded, keyboard-wedge scanners. These interpose themselves between the keyboard and the keyboard port, and when they scan something, they insert the characters just as if they had been typed on the keyboard. The system shouldn't be able to tell the difference between characters produced by scanning and characters produced by typing, so there's no question of OS-related problems.
:)
Other scanners connect to the serial port and require specialized software to take the input from that port and insert it into your application. You'll want to avoid these in most cases - especially if such software doesn't exist for Linux.
Oh, and one more thing: Symbol is the largest producer of scanners in the world, and according to an engineer friend of mine who works there, they put a lot more into quality-control than other companies. Their scanners are often available at discounts of 50% or more off list price (because list price is horribly inflated), so shop around for your reseller and find a good price, but buy a Symbol scanner in the end.
--
Michael Sims
The fourth link at the top is NOT EPIC's analysis of the bill.
Good catch. Sorry, my fault - I've taken a few too many anti-histamines this morning. It's fixed now. If/when EPIC does come out with a comprehensive analysis of the bill, slashdot will know.
--
Michael Sims
For more information about UCITA and what it will do to the software industry, check out badsoftware.com, run by Cem Kaner, a lawyer and computer programmer. It is very bad, much worse than the press article slashdot linked to described. Imagine if you were a lobbyist for a company and you had complete and total freedom to rewrite the laws your company worked under. You'd write the laws to give you all the power and screw everyone else, right? This is what has happened with UCITA. If you have anything to do with software (and why the hell are you reading slashdot if you don't), you need to pay attention to this.
--
Michael Sims
People are missing the entire point here (which is what Dyson wanted you to do, but...). In a nutshell, Esther Dyson and ICANN are doing a number of things to set major policies for the entire internet so that they will favor mega-corporations and totally exclude individuals from any participation in governing the internet. They're levying taxes, setting trademark policies, etc., while operating behind closed doors without individual input. The issue is rather complicated, too complicated for the amount of time and space I have here - do some research, as many, many people have protested ICANN's actions.
The letter which prompted Dyson's response was an accusation from two consumer advocates about ICANN's current policies. (See jya.com for Dyson's response, the original letter, and a parody response to Dyson.) Dyson's response, instead of making any real consideration of the issues, was to blow a lot of smoke and essentially blame NSI for all the bad things that have ever occurred in the history of the world.
Now, NSI is attempting to stake a claim on the .com DNS system, no doubt about it. And they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. But most of the things which Dyson blamed on NSI are actually ICANN's - Dyson's - fault. ICANN is responsible for not opening up the .com registry to competition, not NSI. ICANN is responsible for approving trademark rules which will allow any company to unilaterally take away domain names from individuals without even having to notify them in advance that the name is being challenged. Etc., etc.
Don't fall for Dyson's misleading letter. Corporations see the internet as a tremendous source of income, if only they can establish sufficient control over it (which means keeping governments and individuals from having any input). ICANN is giving away the store to them instead of setting up democratic means of governance. NSI is attacking .com/.org/.net. ICANN's actions will affect the entire internet, DNS, IP allocation, everything. Which one is the greater threat?
Looks like your company firewall is using Smartfilter. Of course, censorware.org is banned under "Criminal Skills". Try the sltrib.com site, they posted a copy of the report there.