It's also about the "commercial advance" button, which they claim "deprives them of a means to profit from their work" (not a precise quote, see the article for the exact wording.)
This is a hedge to counter the obvious point that TV broadcast are distributed widely and freely by the networks, and therefore it's hard to argue that copyright infringement will significantly damage the networks' financial interests... But ooh, if people can hit that +30 second button, it's a totally different story from having a fast-forward like a VCR or Tivo.
Re:Why is everyone lawsuit happy in the US?
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TV Networks Sue ReplayTV
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· Score: 4, Insightful
When are major media corps going to realize that they can't beat it so they should just join it.
They have joined it. They just joined a different team. NBC has a stake in Tivo, which is essentially the same product as ReplayTV.
Why are they suing Replay instead of Tivo? Ostensibly because Replay has a "commercial advance" button that lets you skip forward thirty seconds. Apparently this button spells the difference between a copyright-infringing product (Replay) and a perfectly ok product that NBC does business with (Tivo). Who could have known that the ability to fast forward your video footage would make a product "infringing"?
If the networks win (which they probably will, as I doubt the defendant will spend the dough to fight this one), they not only damage a competitor to one of their interests (Tivo), but they also gain a legal precedent for limiting what has been found to be a perfectly legal practice (time shifting TV.)
So they have a "commercial advance" button. What if they didn't? Would it not be copyright infringement then?
I don't see them suing Tivo, a company that NBC owns a big stake in. Why? Because they don't have this one silly button? I can understand why this product might be seen as a threat by the networks... What I don't understand is their legal case for copyright infringement. Why the heck does the ability to skip forward 30 seconds make the difference between an "un-infringing" product and an infringing one?
The networks are picking on a weak, underfunded company that doesn't have the resources to fight them. What makes it even dirtier is that one of the plaintiffs has a financial stake in that company's direct competitor.
Get yourself a cable modem w/ an Ethernet connector. Hook it up to your computer. Set up DHCP. Go.
What kind of support do Linux and BSD users need from RoadRunner? If you don't know how to set up an Ethernet card with DHCP, you should either find someone experienced with that OS to help you, or you should switch to another OS.
Now Verizon DSL, which requires PPoE... That's another story. They require you to install special software to register, and only supply Windows versions. Though I know plenty of Linux users who've adapted.
PS If it's a problem with the cable modem itself, then I understand completely. Generally RoadRunner (or the cable company) is pretty good at handling those, even if you use a non-supported OS.
It strikes me as unfair that a business running in the UK realistcally has to grab both.co.uk and.com domains to be sure that they reach their (UK) customers while I could simply buy eds-taco-palace.com and everyone knows it's in the States.
I think the unfairness cuts the other way. A UK business could at least buy a.co.uk address, and be sure they weren't competing with the whole world for it. American businesses, on the other hand, have had to compete with everyone on the planet to secure a.com.
Having said that, I don't imagine that too many people have cried themselves to sleep over these issues.
Re:Actually...
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Globalization
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well said.
And of course, America stopping financial support to Israel isn't the end-all-be-all that we like to think. Israel will survive, albeit meanly, without American aid. They may resort to unsavory means to replace the lost revenue, but they'll get by. And they'll buy their arms somewhere else.
If we yank support, we lose our only real lever in that region. Things could get messy fast, and I think every administration in recent history knows it.
I have to confess... Until recently (the last few years), whenever I saw "A New Hope", I thought Luke was talking about the "Kaloan Wars" (despite the fact that this sounded remarkably like a certain brand of Coffee-flavored liquor.) I think my ears preferred not to hear the word "clone", because it somehow made the sentence uncomfortably campy.
All that aside... "Return of the Jedi" didn't have all of the baggage that goes along with "Attack of the Clones". For people hearing the Jedi title for the first time, I imagine the reaction was a) "what's a jedi? why have they returned?" or b) "great, another star wars movie! those jedi are cool." The camp factor was probably much lower than we imagine-- at that point, we didn't have Australians entering "jedi" as their religious affiliation on Census forms, and the like. It hadn't become a joke.
The word "clone", on the other hand, has a million connotations, Jay Leno routines and silly jokes attached to it. Did I mention Wierd Al? Not to mention the "Attack of the [Killer Tomatoes/Creatures from Mars/etc etc." aspect. At least the phrase "Clone wars" has a modicum of seriousness, but... do they really have to attack?
Now that I've said way too much on this subject...
Unfortunately, I thnk audiences are far too cynical and pessimmistic to accept such campy names anymore, as evidenced by the furor over the name "Attack of the Clones".
I think the words "cloning" and "clone" have been so overused that they've gone beyond camp. The image that comes to my mind when I hear either word is of Woody Allen picking up the Leader's giant flattened nose in "Sleeper". For those of you with more up-to-date memories, I'm sure you can find some other silly association.
Obviously in this case Lucas has to mention the Clones somewhere in the title, but he didn't have to make it so comical. Even "Episode 2: The Clone Wars"-- while utterly unimaginative-- sounds a good deal less silly.
I think "Return of the Jedi" would be a perfectly acceptable name for a $100 million+ movie today, assuming people knew what the heck a Jedi was.
I listened to Ashcroft's speech on CNN. Not only did it read as a how-to of what not to do if you're a terrorist in the US, it sounded pretty damn ominous for the rest of us (generally) law-abiding types. Ashcroft is not a sympathetic guy.
I can imagine what the more pragmatic law-enforcement agents are thinking right now: "gee, this probably won't do a damn thing to stop terrorism, but think how many marijuana dealers we'll pick up now. yippee."
You'll have to prove to their lawyers that you aren't using the latest GNU-approved code, but some older "freer" GPL. While that may not be so difficult, the time and effort on your part to defend yourself is simply wasted. This is how the Church of Scientology gets its way so often, not through winning in the courts but simply using them as a harrassment tool.
Let's face it. The GPL can only protect you under the law. If you believe that the law is going to cease to function entirely, you've got bigger problems to address than simply dealing with the FSF's potential abuses.
By your argument, the ASPCA could someday become the world's most tyrannical organization, and begin accusing you of groundless copyright violations just for fun. What can you do? Oppose their existence today?
The FSF has wrapped its projects in a fairly decent license that protects users and them a decent set of legal rights. Furthermore, the FSF relies entirely on volunteers to produce new code, who would vanish if it began abusing its power. If they started tossing around groundless lawsuits, they might intimidate a few people, but if all of the suits were similarly groundless, they'd start losing 'em.
If those protections aren't enough for you, you're just going to have to live in fear. Who knows, Stallman might declare himself president.
But thank you, it is good to know that there's a healthy streak of independence and paranoia around. It may serve a useful function someday.
Which is exactly what the FSF requires before you sign on to any FSF sponsored project.
Doesn't matter, of course. If I download the Linux source code and make modifications of my own, I haven't signed on to anything except for the GPL. If I release my modified version of the code, the FSF doesn't own my modifications-- I'm a co-author of the modified version, and as long as I don't violate the GPL (the version I accepted the code under), neither one of us can prevent the other from distributing or modifying the code.
If you're working on an organized project, you might choose to give up ownership. But rather than doing so, you could always start your own branch at any time, and forget about the FSF. I imagine this will happen if the FSF becomes tyrannical-- people will just ditch the latest stuff and start a new project based off of the last acceptably-licensed release. It's a good check against Stallman taking over OSS.
I'm afraid that's exactly what they can do.
Except that they can't, as that license reads. If I accept the code under the GPL, I can always use it under the terms of the GPL. So they can't assert total control-- they've effectively given some of it up, and they can never take it back.
And if you're sincerely interested in that last question, yes, Stallman has built into the GPL a clause that asserts that software covered under the standard GPL will necessarily be covered under future, more restrictive, GPL versions.
Do you mean this clause:
The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.
In other words, Gnu can make new licenses, but they can't force you to follow them. You have the right to obey the earlier licenses or the newer licenses, as you see fit.
If the person who wrote the program specifies which version of the license they want you obey, that's their right. But once they've release the program to you, they can't retroactively change the deal and force you to obey a different copy of the license.
Similarly, once you've published a piece of software under the GPL, you can't unpublish it. You can't change the terms of the license for those copies that you've already given away.
You can, if you'd like, also distribute it under another license, but that doesn't affect those copies already in circulation under the GPL.
One more thing-- in order to relicense something, you have to be the author of it. You can't co-opt a project that 300 people contributed code to, even if you were the person who started it-- unless you get permission from each of those 300 contributing authors. Assuming you can even locate them. So the FSF can therefore go after GPL violations as long as they own the copyright to some portion of the code, but they can't assert unlimited control over the code, as large parts of it may not belong to them.
It only takes one unscrupulous person to wrest total control away from proletariat.
Stalin... Stallman? A little too close for comfort!
Sure. And then what'll that unscrupulous person do... force coders to contribute? Retroactively invalidate the GPL so individuals no longer have the resources to build their own apps?
They worked out the hacker was in Germany via a similar method to the one you described.
No, all they did was measure the time it took his packets to get from place to place, then performed a back-of-the-envelope calculation to guesstimate a distance. It was about as scientific as Dianetics, even if the final answer happened to be more or less correct (as in, within a couple of thousand miles, in some direction.)
Had the hacker been sitting on the end of a modem in France, but dialed into a machine in Germany, their "system" could have produced an even more bogus result.
Yeah, use your existing muscle to force computer manufacturers to bundle your latest OS, whether customers ask for it or not. Brilliant. Notice how much of a flop Windows 2000 has been, because it hasn't been bundled by default?
Er, that'd be the monopoly power that two federal courts have agreed Microsoft enjoys. Both of these courts have examined the matter a lot more thoroughly than you or I, so I would imagine their justification for this finding goes a lot deeper than "Microsoft makes a product, and can do whatever they want with it."
Also, XP purportedly contains a system for disabling certain drivers if they're placed on a remotely updated "kill" list by Microsoft. I doubt that this will be used to block Java downloads, but the existence of such a system is a mite threatening.
It's simply smart business not to support your competitors
It's generally smart business to satisfy your customers, most of whom use Java on a fairly regular basis and will be put out if those drivers are removed. Of course, Microsoft is able to put business interests ahead of servicing its customers, and that's because... they have a monopoly.
When the Gov't is your employer it acts as a company and not government.
Really? There are hundreds of examples where the government has been treated differently by the courts (vs. private corporations) in regards to the way it hires and treats employees.
The Red Hat techie who erased her files was irresponsible and stupid - you don't win people over by switching them without consultation
I don't think that "irresponsible and stupid" is a good way to describe that person. That's outright sociopathic. Switching someone's OS without permission isn't a good thing to do, but it's a world apart from completely reformatting their drive without making a backup of their work.
If I were that person's boss, I would want them out of the company immediately. The fact that this appears tIn a computerized company, it'd be a nightmare to employ somebody who erases company files if they happen to get in the way of the system configuration... Yikes. You might as well have an janitor going through your file cabinets and shredding all that dirty, messy paper.
ISTR that's true for all of the means of infection, not just pulmonary. A course of antibiotics (I want to say sixty days of Cipro, but I'm not a doctor) is generally effective, but only if it's started before symptoms manifest. Once the patient shows symptoms, though, his immune system has to fight the bug all on its own and antibiotics are irrelevant.
I don't think it's a big deal for cutaneous infection. Those are rarely fatal, with treatment, and I think it's pretty obvious that you have a developing problem before it reaches the potentially dangerous zone.
Unfortunately, Pulmonary (and I'm not sure about Intestinal) Anthrax doesn't give a whole lot of warning. Coldlike symptoms followed by no symptoms at all... That's an average week for me during the chilly times of year.
Everything else you say is spot on. Hopefully we wouldn't need to seriously quarantine an Anthrax-infected populace, though, as Anthrax isn't terrifically contageous (unless you get it on your clothes or something.)
You are choosing to ignore the fundamental difference between the two: that digital photography is organic and constructive while this filesharing is destructive and does not, and probably cannot, exist organically. Just because something is "outmoded" does not mean it is acceptable, good, or desirable.
For one thing, if you believe (sincerely) that nobody would produce recorded music if the RIAA studios went out of business, you're dead wrong. A lot of people record music for no profit, or simply as a way to promote their performances. Without major labels, the quality of music might go down slightly-- and likely, the types of music we listen to would change. The file sharing networks would continue to exist. In fact, they'd be more important than ever. And sooner or later people would build new business models around them. Artists would still make money.
I admit that the transition may be uncomfortable for some, but I think draconian anti-copyright laws are going to prove uncomfortable to a much larger group of people.
Your assertion that the file sharing networks are "destructive and non-organic" is like stating that bicycles are "destructive" because they use paved roads, and simultaneously endanger some of the economic systems that we use to pay for those roads (toll booths and gas taxes.) I'm sure that if the people of the world decide to adopt bicycles for short-distance travel, we would find a different way to pay for pavement maintenance. The roads wouldn't go away (though they might get narrower.)
Today's file sharing networks do cannabalize RIAA-produced music. And that's illegal, according to our laws. Not because IP is equivalent to real "property", but because the gov't has passed laws giving a "short-term" exclusive monopoly to the publishing agencies. The real question is whether those laws-- which made sense in the days of books and records-- still make a whole lot of sense today (and more imporantly, whether they're enforceable today.)
Create a law (or policy), and regardless of how much sense it makes, somebody will make a viable business model off of it. Violate it or take it away, they'll scream bloody murder. Even if the violation of the law becomes so commonplace that 75% of the country's citizens are violating it (without hurting anybody or depriving them of life or property in the process), those organizations will advocate stricter enforcement rather than a change in the law.
File sharing networks aren't going away anytime soon. In fact, the notion of moving files from machine to machine is going to become a whole lot more popular as time goes by; it's not a genie you can put back in the bottle. Unfortunately, now that the US has decided to criminalize activity that doesn't deprive anybody of property (or really affect them in any other way than their bottom line), large numbers of US citizens are going to become criminals. As a democratic republic, at some point it's going to be up to the people to decide whether the current distribution model (and the record companies' profits and content) justifies the imposition of criminal penalties on large portions of the population.
If US citizens decide that BMG's stock and Jennifer Lopez are worth it, we'll a) voluntarily tone our activities down and become law-abiding people, b) leave the laws in place and suffer regular criminal penalties... or c) change the laws and hope that capitalism will work its magic. I don't think we're likely to adopt (a) on a broad enough scale, and I don't like the idea of (b). Is there another alternative?
"Advancements" such as filesharing certainly disrupt, but they do not necessarily provide a complete solution for all involved--even for its own continued existence (e.g., once novel IP dies, the need for those kinds of services dies).
Polaroid went bankrupt because their business model had lost its value. That is, with chipmakers providing a form of nearly infinitely reusable film, the model of selling expensive, single-use film was outmoded.
Similarly, you could say that the RIAA's business model is becoming outmoded-- that is, holding an expensive single-provider monopoly on the distribution of easily-duplicated bits doesn't work anymore. It's unfortunate that this fundamentally flawed model may be the only way to justify the creation of content (although many would argue with that.)
The shame of the situation is that yes, the file-sharing networks might rely on the RIAA for the content they distribute (although I'd imagine there would still be music in a post-RIAA world, don't you think?). But that doesn't necessarily mean that the RIAA's business model can continue to exist. I'm not sure that the deliberate maintenance of a broken business model through increasingly strict copyright laws is going to save anyone.
Early music companies distributed music via telephone wires, and charged for it. That method of distribution was soon outmoded by radio-- the problem being, of course, that it was damn hard to charge for a broadcast service. But business soon found a way to deal with the situation, and now we can listen to free radio anytime we want. Rather than come to that solution, the industry could have attempted to collect mandatory license fees for home radio sets. If it had been powerful enough, it probably would have gotten the laws passed, and they would have probably been flouted and eventually reversed. But thankfully, we came to another solution.
Also, you don't mention that anthrax is NOT contagious. You pretty much have to be a target to get it.
Anthrax is useful as a weapon because it's so damn deliverable. The spores are easy to aerosolize. They live forever on whatever they touch.
If someone successfully releases a cloud of the stuff in a public place, thousands of people could get Inhalation Anthrax. Wouldn't take contagion to spread.
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This is a hedge to counter the obvious point that TV broadcast are distributed widely and freely by the networks, and therefore it's hard to argue that copyright infringement will significantly damage the networks' financial interests... But ooh, if people can hit that +30 second button, it's a totally different story from having a fast-forward like a VCR or Tivo.
They have joined it. They just joined a different team. NBC has a stake in Tivo, which is essentially the same product as ReplayTV.
Why are they suing Replay instead of Tivo? Ostensibly because Replay has a "commercial advance" button that lets you skip forward thirty seconds. Apparently this button spells the difference between a copyright-infringing product (Replay) and a perfectly ok product that NBC does business with (Tivo). Who could have known that the ability to fast forward your video footage would make a product "infringing"?
If the networks win (which they probably will, as I doubt the defendant will spend the dough to fight this one), they not only damage a competitor to one of their interests (Tivo), but they also gain a legal precedent for limiting what has been found to be a perfectly legal practice (time shifting TV.)
I don't see them suing Tivo, a company that NBC owns a big stake in. Why? Because they don't have this one silly button? I can understand why this product might be seen as a threat by the networks... What I don't understand is their legal case for copyright infringement. Why the heck does the ability to skip forward 30 seconds make the difference between an "un-infringing" product and an infringing one?
The networks are picking on a weak, underfunded company that doesn't have the resources to fight them. What makes it even dirtier is that one of the plaintiffs has a financial stake in that company's direct competitor.
What kind of support do Linux and BSD users need from RoadRunner? If you don't know how to set up an Ethernet card with DHCP, you should either find someone experienced with that OS to help you, or you should switch to another OS.
Now Verizon DSL, which requires PPoE... That's another story. They require you to install special software to register, and only supply Windows versions. Though I know plenty of Linux users who've adapted.
PS If it's a problem with the cable modem itself, then I understand completely. Generally RoadRunner (or the cable company) is pretty good at handling those, even if you use a non-supported OS.
I think the unfairness cuts the other way. A UK business could at least buy a .co.uk address, and be sure they weren't competing with the whole world for it. American businesses, on the other hand, have had to compete with everyone on the planet to secure a .com.
Having said that, I don't imagine that too many people have cried themselves to sleep over these issues.
And of course, America stopping financial support to Israel isn't the end-all-be-all that we like to think. Israel will survive, albeit meanly, without American aid. They may resort to unsavory means to replace the lost revenue, but they'll get by. And they'll buy their arms somewhere else.
If we yank support, we lose our only real lever in that region. Things could get messy fast, and I think every administration in recent history knows it.
All that aside... "Return of the Jedi" didn't have all of the baggage that goes along with "Attack of the Clones". For people hearing the Jedi title for the first time, I imagine the reaction was a) "what's a jedi? why have they returned?" or b) "great, another star wars movie! those jedi are cool." The camp factor was probably much lower than we imagine-- at that point, we didn't have Australians entering "jedi" as their religious affiliation on Census forms, and the like. It hadn't become a joke.
The word "clone", on the other hand, has a million connotations, Jay Leno routines and silly jokes attached to it. Did I mention Wierd Al? Not to mention the "Attack of the [Killer Tomatoes/Creatures from Mars/etc etc." aspect. At least the phrase "Clone wars" has a modicum of seriousness, but... do they really have to attack?
Now that I've said way too much on this subject...
I think the words "cloning" and "clone" have been so overused that they've gone beyond camp. The image that comes to my mind when I hear either word is of Woody Allen picking up the Leader's giant flattened nose in "Sleeper". For those of you with more up-to-date memories, I'm sure you can find some other silly association.
Obviously in this case Lucas has to mention the Clones somewhere in the title, but he didn't have to make it so comical. Even "Episode 2: The Clone Wars"-- while utterly unimaginative-- sounds a good deal less silly.
I think "Return of the Jedi" would be a perfectly acceptable name for a $100 million+ movie today, assuming people knew what the heck a Jedi was.
It's funny, this tactic seems to be a completely new offshoot of the Star Wars phenomenon. Did it exist before the Episode 1 trailer came out?
And will it keep working, now that the hype's been somewhat deflated?
I can imagine what the more pragmatic law-enforcement agents are thinking right now: "gee, this probably won't do a damn thing to stop terrorism, but think how many marijuana dealers we'll pick up now. yippee."
Let's face it. The GPL can only protect you under the law. If you believe that the law is going to cease to function entirely, you've got bigger problems to address than simply dealing with the FSF's potential abuses.
By your argument, the ASPCA could someday become the world's most tyrannical organization, and begin accusing you of groundless copyright violations just for fun. What can you do? Oppose their existence today?
The FSF has wrapped its projects in a fairly decent license that protects users and them a decent set of legal rights. Furthermore, the FSF relies entirely on volunteers to produce new code, who would vanish if it began abusing its power. If they started tossing around groundless lawsuits, they might intimidate a few people, but if all of the suits were similarly groundless, they'd start losing 'em.
If those protections aren't enough for you, you're just going to have to live in fear. Who knows, Stallman might declare himself president.
But thank you, it is good to know that there's a healthy streak of independence and paranoia around. It may serve a useful function someday.
Doesn't matter, of course. If I download the Linux source code and make modifications of my own, I haven't signed on to anything except for the GPL. If I release my modified version of the code, the FSF doesn't own my modifications-- I'm a co-author of the modified version, and as long as I don't violate the GPL (the version I accepted the code under), neither one of us can prevent the other from distributing or modifying the code.
If you're working on an organized project, you might choose to give up ownership. But rather than doing so, you could always start your own branch at any time, and forget about the FSF. I imagine this will happen if the FSF becomes tyrannical-- people will just ditch the latest stuff and start a new project based off of the last acceptably-licensed release. It's a good check against Stallman taking over OSS.
I'm afraid that's exactly what they can do.
Except that they can't, as that license reads. If I accept the code under the GPL, I can always use it under the terms of the GPL. So they can't assert total control-- they've effectively given some of it up, and they can never take it back.
Do you mean this clause:
In other words, Gnu can make new licenses, but they can't force you to follow them. You have the right to obey the earlier licenses or the newer licenses, as you see fit.
If the person who wrote the program specifies which version of the license they want you obey, that's their right. But once they've release the program to you, they can't retroactively change the deal and force you to obey a different copy of the license.
Similarly, once you've published a piece of software under the GPL, you can't unpublish it. You can't change the terms of the license for those copies that you've already given away.
You can, if you'd like, also distribute it under another license, but that doesn't affect those copies already in circulation under the GPL.
One more thing-- in order to relicense something, you have to be the author of it. You can't co-opt a project that 300 people contributed code to, even if you were the person who started it-- unless you get permission from each of those 300 contributing authors. Assuming you can even locate them. So the FSF can therefore go after GPL violations as long as they own the copyright to some portion of the code, but they can't assert unlimited control over the code, as large parts of it may not belong to them.
Sure. And then what'll that unscrupulous person do... force coders to contribute? Retroactively invalidate the GPL so individuals no longer have the resources to build their own apps?
No, all they did was measure the time it took his packets to get from place to place, then performed a back-of-the-envelope calculation to guesstimate a distance. It was about as scientific as Dianetics, even if the final answer happened to be more or less correct (as in, within a couple of thousand miles, in some direction.)
Had the hacker been sitting on the end of a modem in France, but dialed into a machine in Germany, their "system" could have produced an even more bogus result.
Yeah, use your existing muscle to force computer manufacturers to bundle your latest OS, whether customers ask for it or not. Brilliant. Notice how much of a flop Windows 2000 has been, because it hasn't been bundled by default?
Er, that'd be the monopoly power that two federal courts have agreed Microsoft enjoys. Both of these courts have examined the matter a lot more thoroughly than you or I, so I would imagine their justification for this finding goes a lot deeper than "Microsoft makes a product, and can do whatever they want with it."
Also, XP purportedly contains a system for disabling certain drivers if they're placed on a remotely updated "kill" list by Microsoft. I doubt that this will be used to block Java downloads, but the existence of such a system is a mite threatening.
It's simply smart business not to support your competitors
It's generally smart business to satisfy your customers, most of whom use Java on a fairly regular basis and will be put out if those drivers are removed. Of course, Microsoft is able to put business interests ahead of servicing its customers, and that's because... they have a monopoly.
Really? There are hundreds of examples where the government has been treated differently by the courts (vs. private corporations) in regards to the way it hires and treats employees.
I don't think that "irresponsible and stupid" is a good way to describe that person. That's outright sociopathic. Switching someone's OS without permission isn't a good thing to do, but it's a world apart from completely reformatting their drive without making a backup of their work.
If I were that person's boss, I would want them out of the company immediately. The fact that this appears tIn a computerized company, it'd be a nightmare to employ somebody who erases company files if they happen to get in the way of the system configuration... Yikes. You might as well have an janitor going through your file cabinets and shredding all that dirty, messy paper.
Good luck.
I don't think it's a big deal for cutaneous infection. Those are rarely fatal, with treatment, and I think it's pretty obvious that you have a developing problem before it reaches the potentially dangerous zone.
Unfortunately, Pulmonary (and I'm not sure about Intestinal) Anthrax doesn't give a whole lot of warning. Coldlike symptoms followed by no symptoms at all... That's an average week for me during the chilly times of year.
Everything else you say is spot on. Hopefully we wouldn't need to seriously quarantine an Anthrax-infected populace, though, as Anthrax isn't terrifically contageous (unless you get it on your clothes or something.)
For one thing, if you believe (sincerely) that nobody would produce recorded music if the RIAA studios went out of business, you're dead wrong. A lot of people record music for no profit, or simply as a way to promote their performances. Without major labels, the quality of music might go down slightly-- and likely, the types of music we listen to would change. The file sharing networks would continue to exist. In fact, they'd be more important than ever. And sooner or later people would build new business models around them. Artists would still make money.
I admit that the transition may be uncomfortable for some, but I think draconian anti-copyright laws are going to prove uncomfortable to a much larger group of people.
Your assertion that the file sharing networks are "destructive and non-organic" is like stating that bicycles are "destructive" because they use paved roads, and simultaneously endanger some of the economic systems that we use to pay for those roads (toll booths and gas taxes.) I'm sure that if the people of the world decide to adopt bicycles for short-distance travel, we would find a different way to pay for pavement maintenance. The roads wouldn't go away (though they might get narrower.)
Today's file sharing networks do cannabalize RIAA-produced music. And that's illegal, according to our laws. Not because IP is equivalent to real "property", but because the gov't has passed laws giving a "short-term" exclusive monopoly to the publishing agencies. The real question is whether those laws-- which made sense in the days of books and records-- still make a whole lot of sense today (and more imporantly, whether they're enforceable today.)
Create a law (or policy), and regardless of how much sense it makes, somebody will make a viable business model off of it. Violate it or take it away, they'll scream bloody murder. Even if the violation of the law becomes so commonplace that 75% of the country's citizens are violating it (without hurting anybody or depriving them of life or property in the process), those organizations will advocate stricter enforcement rather than a change in the law.
File sharing networks aren't going away anytime soon. In fact, the notion of moving files from machine to machine is going to become a whole lot more popular as time goes by; it's not a genie you can put back in the bottle. Unfortunately, now that the US has decided to criminalize activity that doesn't deprive anybody of property (or really affect them in any other way than their bottom line), large numbers of US citizens are going to become criminals. As a democratic republic, at some point it's going to be up to the people to decide whether the current distribution model (and the record companies' profits and content) justifies the imposition of criminal penalties on large portions of the population.
If US citizens decide that BMG's stock and Jennifer Lopez are worth it, we'll a) voluntarily tone our activities down and become law-abiding people, b) leave the laws in place and suffer regular criminal penalties... or c) change the laws and hope that capitalism will work its magic. I don't think we're likely to adopt (a) on a broad enough scale, and I don't like the idea of (b). Is there another alternative?
Course, now that you can buy the Polaroid PhotoMax printer for $70 (prints to Spectra film), either scenario could go that way.
Polaroid went bankrupt because their business model had lost its value. That is, with chipmakers providing a form of nearly infinitely reusable film, the model of selling expensive, single-use film was outmoded.
Similarly, you could say that the RIAA's business model is becoming outmoded-- that is, holding an expensive single-provider monopoly on the distribution of easily-duplicated bits doesn't work anymore. It's unfortunate that this fundamentally flawed model may be the only way to justify the creation of content (although many would argue with that.)
The shame of the situation is that yes, the file-sharing networks might rely on the RIAA for the content they distribute (although I'd imagine there would still be music in a post-RIAA world, don't you think?). But that doesn't necessarily mean that the RIAA's business model can continue to exist. I'm not sure that the deliberate maintenance of a broken business model through increasingly strict copyright laws is going to save anyone.
Early music companies distributed music via telephone wires, and charged for it. That method of distribution was soon outmoded by radio-- the problem being, of course, that it was damn hard to charge for a broadcast service. But business soon found a way to deal with the situation, and now we can listen to free radio anytime we want. Rather than come to that solution, the industry could have attempted to collect mandatory license fees for home radio sets. If it had been powerful enough, it probably would have gotten the laws passed, and they would have probably been flouted and eventually reversed. But thankfully, we came to another solution.
Anthrax is useful as a weapon because it's so damn deliverable. The spores are easy to aerosolize. They live forever on whatever they touch.
If someone successfully releases a cloud of the stuff in a public place, thousands of people could get Inhalation Anthrax. Wouldn't take contagion to spread.