This is a ridiculous extrapolation; doing the same to health care costs means that health care and education will each be several hundred percent of our GDP in 18 years.
The cost of education is driven by the federal student loan program, the expansion of middle management, and the development of luxury dorms and gyms. I think it's transparent that such costs cannot continue to expand at the same rate for the next 18 years.
CARB says: "The manufacturer of replacement electronic ignitions determines which of their models are considered replacements for original equipment. These replacement electronic ignitions are then listed by vehicle year, make, model and engine size in the manufacturer's catalogue. Electronic ignitions or electronic point replacement units for vehicles not originally equipped with these items require an Executive Order to be legal for street use. Swapping electronic ignitions from different years, engines, or makes is illegal."
And I stand corrected on flam test. But if we're honest, in aviation, $40 and $1000 is just a rounding error.
Let's talk about tinting windows. In California, you can tint a car's back windows and rear window with whatever you want. Front passenger windows have to have at least 70% transparency. No approval necessary. What does it take to get an STC to put window tint on an aircraft?
Let's talk about engine systems. In California, you can replace an ignition system with another ignition with any system designated as valid by the manufacturer of that ignition system. Go look at the ElectroAir electronic ignition STC: you still need a magneto system, and that STC was probably quite expensive to get.
Let's talk about upholstery. In California, there appears to be no regulation on upholstery for car interiors. The FAA requires certain fire resistance, and the lab testing is apparently around $1000.
Let's talk about carriage for hire. In California, Uber and Lyft appear to operate without regulation. The FAA would nail you requiring an Air Carrier certificate (Part 135) if you did what they did in aviation.
Yep, those reviews are useless. Now if there were only a legal way to listen to songs before I bought them. Maybe if some companies would help out by paying money (or receiving money) to broadcast music on radio frequencies. They could encode the data by modulating the frequency of a carrier, and use a center frequency between 87.5 MHz and 108 MHz. Of course, that'd require a centralized agency to dole out that frequency to minimize interference, some people to do enforcement, maybe they'd have to sell advertising to pay their bills... nah, too much infrastructure.
Since the stated purpose is to determine whether or not this was a suicide or an accident, and since the cause of death is not described, and since the payment arrangements are not described, let me start with some assumptions.
1. Death was by traumatic injury. 2. Payment from some third party (generally an insurance company) would depend on whether or not the cause of death was suicide.
There is a rebuttable presumption in many states that death by traumatic injury is accidental, which shifts the burden of proof to the third party. If, in the course of litigating the claim against the third party, the third pleads/brings facts sufficient to overcome the presumption, you should get a subpoena that will open all the accounts for you. I'd avoid cracking the laptop myself if you're going to take this route: you want someone who appears unbiased to be looking through the files. Any destructive change may be considered destruction of evidence, and such would be construed as strongly as possible against the destroyer of that evidence.
Don't get too happy yet. The AG's office serves as counsel to state agencies, of which U of Oregon is one. They're not launching an investigation (e.g. this is not a People vs MediaSentry); they're seeking evidence which they can use to quash the subpoena proposed by the Plaintiffs. Nothing says that the response won't result in criminal charges (unfortunately only a misdemeanor), but this is not an AG office investigation, its a discovery related to this pretrial motion.
Someone was demonstrating this for key exchange (though I don't remember if it was Bluetooth) back at WMCSA 2003 in Monterey, and it was published at MobiSys 2005 in Seattle. So how's this news?
Well I'm not surprised. Microsoft Research has tons of sharp security guys working there. Niels Ferguson is quite well-known in security circles. You don't get your company's name as an "author" unless your employees actually did the work; funding is not good enough. It might annoy the NSA, but academics don't care that much.
I call BS. Cite a case. Fiction is unlikely to be enabling, and Mr. POSITA (person of ordinary skill...) would still have to be able to build it, at that time, from that description. Otherwise you're into 103-land, with the test of KSR.
Last time I was called for jury duty (less than a month ago) the judge asked "will you be able to apply the law as I give it to you, whether or not you agree with it?" I answered "if it is grossly unjust, I will not." I was dismissed "for cause." No one else of the 12 people up for voir dire answered that way. Most jurors will blindly follow their oath and convict. Also see the Rosenthal medical marijuana case.
As to the other reply, the duration of the tape is likely to be admissible, because it is evidence regarding mens rea.
I wouldn't say patents are given out like lollipops. If you've ever been through a patent examination, you know that examiners are not the most skilled in the arts they examine, but they're not completely ignorant either. Patents are mainly a problem because judges are technically incapable of properly assessing Section 103 obviousness, and because 102(b)'s one-year clock is not short enough. KSR v. Teleflex should fix some of the obviousness problems. I don't know how to fix the 102(b) problem without abolishing tech patents, because technology moves too fast, and I think the time period is also too long for tech, for the same reason.
So do you only illegally distribute music that has been around for less than 5 years, or whatever you think the copyright term should be? My point is that the slashdot groupthink opposes all RIAA/MPAA copyrights, regardless of freshness. Even if you say that the legitimate copyright length is 5 years (which I could live with), then you should only cheer the enforcement of GPL for software less than 5 years old, and you should support RIAA/MPAA copyrights less than 5 years old. Since substantial P2P copyright violation consists of Top40 songs (see the ober dicta of MGM v. Grokster 545 U.S. 913 (2005)) which are almost exclusively less than 5 years old, my argument holds.
BTW I don't think the slashdot groupthink only opposes the "draconian enforcement and perpetual lengthening of copyright expiration." I do too, and disagree with Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), but that has nothing to do with the copyright enforcements currently brought by the RIAA/MPAA. Furthermore, I don't agree with their litigation/investigation tactics, but that's not relevant to the copyright itself.
Irrelevant. In a perfect world you wouldn't need copyright, either. Each user would pay something between the incremental cost (close to 0) and their personal benefit, or they won't use the creative work.
We're talking about the enforcement mechanism, and in particular, the law that allows both the netfilter author and the RIAA/MPAA to state a claim. Without copyright (or some similar idea written into a contract), there is no GPL. Period. See ESR's manifesto.
That's bullshit and you know it. On several occasions, pretty much every story about file trading and copyright I see posts from slashdotters saying that they believe current copyright for songs is out of touch with reality, but still wouldn't participate in illegal file trading because of the ethical issues. You don't give people enough credit. Perhaps you see those people, but you also see plenty of people with the refrain "fuck the {MP,RI}AA," I'll copy your songs/movies and there's nothing you can do about it.
Plus, you're talking apples to oranges when you compare adhering to the GPL to adhering to what the RIAA wants with regards to songs. The GPL only lets you do more with the work than would otherwise be possible via copyright, the RIAA wants to restrict the rights of users even further than what current copyright does allow. This distinction is legally dubious. The GPL is a license, without which you couldn't even run the program in most cases (temporary copies in RAM fall under copyright law, see Lessig's "Code"), so clearly some license is necessary for all useful software. With copyright on songs/movies, you still can play them for private use from the original media that you purchased, and the {RI,MP}AA will not do anything to you for it. Beyond that, ripping, placeshifting, etc. is semi-protected by Sony v. Universal City 464 US 417 (1984). Despite the more broad-reaching intent of the {MP,RI}AA (e.g. lobbying for laws like the DMCA), the cause of action in their peer-to-peer enforcement actions is copyright infringement. Now I'm not a big fan of their litigation tactics, but I think that such suits (with better and more legal investigative techniques) are the right way to deal with file sharing. It's that same cause of action that allows the enforcement of the GPL.
Note that I said "RIAA/MPAA copyrights," not tactics.
Now we will see the same people who oppose RIAA/MPAA copyrights cheering the copyright action that enforces open source. Don't you see that you can't have it both ways?
The delays that people experience before they die is driving many would-be inheriters to murder others or contract for their death. The problem is compounded by the fact that increasing medical costs for seniors is decreasing the available inheritence. According to a survey based on a sample of life expectancies and previous estates, generation X is waiting 8 to 10 years longer than previous generations for their inheritences. Those who believe they deserve such funds earlier have resorted to poisoning or even shooting their parents in a bid to preserve a larger portion of the estate and to obtain earlier access. Poor kids.
This has nothing to do with rights. This has to do with laws created to reward the rather expensive production of TV shows, which the networks choose to monetize in ways some people don't like.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (x) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
That's only a defense if you publish more than a year prior to the offender's date of invention, or as long as you're still working on the invention. See 35 USC 102(b) and (g).
I've been really annoyed lately at how bad patents get awarded and then litigated...
In real patent litigation, the main way to claim invalidity is 102(b). This says that if the work was published in a printed publication, or for sale in this country, more than one year prior to the filing date, then the patent is invalid. There are other grounds for invalidity, such as 103 (obviousness), but because of bad case law, obviousness is a very slight extension to 102(b) (hopefully this will be fixed with KSR v Teleflex, currently before the US Supreme Court). This one-year bar essentially means that as long as I'm within one year of being the first to do it, and I'm the first to file for a patent for it, then I'll win as long as no previous inventors filed for a patent. (We're a first-to-invent system with some caveats; if the first inventor doesn't try to patent it, he can lose his patent rights to a later inventor).
In technology, one year is a really long time, so its important that everyone files for patents lest something "obvious" be granted, and your competitor take away all your customers by claiming that your technology infringes their patent. Its way easier to solve this problem before the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences than it is before a judge and jury who have no technical knowledge whatsoever (and probably try patent cases once in a blue moon). Sure, if you lose in district court, you can always appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but by the time the appeal is litigated, you may have lost most of your customers.
Microsoft's doing the smart thing by filing for this patent. Hopefully they'll also do the right thing by not abusing it.
Whatever happened to sovereign immunity? Costs are typically not awarded against the United States under laws waiving sovereign immunity, and probably shouldn't be against the states either...
Pardon my ignorance as a novice in law, but since ND Cal is under the jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit, doesn't the parent poster's precedent trump the reference you just gave? (Sorry for my laziness, I'm in the middle of something and don't have time to read the opinions).
Who cares if it increases their sales? If it does it in a way that's contrary to the author's intent, then copyright law prohibits it. Consider someone who writes a book on the evils of the Internet and prohibits its contents from being shown on the Internet. Why should that hypothetical author accept Google posting their book? What if Google had fewer controls so that the entire book could be copied? Publishers that want Google to index can provide Google a license. Those who don't should be protected by law (and Google's use has serious problems under fair use doctrine, since the copied amount is the entire use, it impacts the marketability of reference works where only a few pages are needed at any time, it can be used to form a collection of works, and it is being commercially exploited.
The slashdottitude of "unauthorized copying of books/music/videos/software is just free marketing" is in direct contradiction to the letter and intent of modern copyright law, and even if it does help sales, that's a decision for the copyright holder to make.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a ridiculous extrapolation; doing the same to health care costs means that health care and education will each be several hundred percent of our GDP in 18 years.
The cost of education is driven by the federal student loan program, the expansion of middle management, and the development of luxury dorms and gyms. I think it's transparent that such costs cannot continue to expand at the same rate for the next 18 years.
Real classy, attack the person, not the claims.
CARB says: "The manufacturer of replacement electronic ignitions determines which of their models are considered replacements for original equipment. These replacement electronic ignitions are then listed by vehicle year, make, model and engine size in the manufacturer's catalogue. Electronic ignitions or electronic point replacement units for vehicles not originally equipped with these items require an Executive Order to be legal for street use. Swapping electronic ignitions from different years, engines, or makes is illegal."
And I stand corrected on flam test. But if we're honest, in aviation, $40 and $1000 is just a rounding error.
How about my other two examples?
Here, I'll play.
Let's talk about tinting windows. In California, you can tint a car's back windows and rear window with whatever you want. Front passenger windows have to have at least 70% transparency. No approval necessary. What does it take to get an STC to put window tint on an aircraft?
Let's talk about engine systems. In California, you can replace an ignition system with another ignition with any system designated as valid by the manufacturer of that ignition system. Go look at the ElectroAir electronic ignition STC: you still need a magneto system, and that STC was probably quite expensive to get.
Let's talk about upholstery. In California, there appears to be no regulation on upholstery for car interiors. The FAA requires certain fire resistance, and the lab testing is apparently around $1000.
Let's talk about carriage for hire. In California, Uber and Lyft appear to operate without regulation. The FAA would nail you requiring an Air Carrier certificate (Part 135) if you did what they did in aviation.
Yep, those reviews are useless. Now if there were only a legal way to listen to songs before I bought them. Maybe if some companies would help out by paying money (or receiving money) to broadcast music on radio frequencies. They could encode the data by modulating the frequency of a carrier, and use a center frequency between 87.5 MHz and 108 MHz. Of course, that'd require a centralized agency to dole out that frequency to minimize interference, some people to do enforcement, maybe they'd have to sell advertising to pay their bills... nah, too much infrastructure.
http://courses.ece.uiuc.edu/ece445/?g=Home&p=Projects&c=Featured%20Projects
Includes some crazy stuff like a photographing UAV, a PC-based oscilloscope, and a combination lock brute-forcer.
Since the stated purpose is to determine whether or not this was a suicide or an accident, and since the cause of death is not described, and since the payment arrangements are not described, let me start with some assumptions.
1. Death was by traumatic injury.
2. Payment from some third party (generally an insurance company) would depend on whether or not the cause of death was suicide.
There is a rebuttable presumption in many states that death by traumatic injury is accidental, which shifts the burden of proof to the third party. If, in the course of litigating the claim against the third party, the third pleads/brings facts sufficient to overcome the presumption, you should get a subpoena that will open all the accounts for you. I'd avoid cracking the laptop myself if you're going to take this route: you want someone who appears unbiased to be looking through the files. Any destructive change may be considered destruction of evidence, and such would be construed as strongly as possible against the destroyer of that evidence.
IANAL. YMMV. Law may vary in your state.
Don't get too happy yet. The AG's office serves as counsel to state agencies, of which U of Oregon is one. They're not launching an investigation (e.g. this is not a People vs MediaSentry); they're seeking evidence which they can use to quash the subpoena proposed by the Plaintiffs. Nothing says that the response won't result in criminal charges (unfortunately only a misdemeanor), but this is not an AG office investigation, its a discovery related to this pretrial motion.
Someone was demonstrating this for key exchange (though I don't remember if it was Bluetooth) back at WMCSA 2003 in Monterey, and it was published at MobiSys 2005 in Seattle. So how's this news?
Well I'm not surprised. Microsoft Research has tons of sharp security guys working there. Niels Ferguson is quite well-known in security circles. You don't get your company's name as an "author" unless your employees actually did the work; funding is not good enough. It might annoy the NSA, but academics don't care that much.
Like the iclicker can help you gauge student understanding. (counting the blank stares helps too).
I call BS. Cite a case. Fiction is unlikely to be enabling, and Mr. POSITA (person of ordinary skill...) would still have to be able to build it, at that time, from that description. Otherwise you're into 103-land, with the test of KSR.
The 20 second clip may not be covered under Title 17, but the work is, and therefore the 20 second part thereof is covered under (a).
Last time I was called for jury duty (less than a month ago) the judge asked "will you be able to apply the law as I give it to you, whether or not you agree with it?" I answered "if it is grossly unjust, I will not." I was dismissed "for cause." No one else of the 12 people up for voir dire answered that way. Most jurors will blindly follow their oath and convict. Also see the Rosenthal medical marijuana case.
As to the other reply, the duration of the tape is likely to be admissible, because it is evidence regarding mens rea.
I wouldn't say patents are given out like lollipops. If you've ever been through a patent examination, you know that examiners are not the most skilled in the arts they examine, but they're not completely ignorant either. Patents are mainly a problem because judges are technically incapable of properly assessing Section 103 obviousness, and because 102(b)'s one-year clock is not short enough. KSR v. Teleflex should fix some of the obviousness problems. I don't know how to fix the 102(b) problem without abolishing tech patents, because technology moves too fast, and I think the time period is also too long for tech, for the same reason.
So do you only illegally distribute music that has been around for less than 5 years, or whatever you think the copyright term should be? My point is that the slashdot groupthink opposes all RIAA/MPAA copyrights, regardless of freshness. Even if you say that the legitimate copyright length is 5 years (which I could live with), then you should only cheer the enforcement of GPL for software less than 5 years old, and you should support RIAA/MPAA copyrights less than 5 years old. Since substantial P2P copyright violation consists of Top40 songs (see the ober dicta of MGM v. Grokster 545 U.S. 913 (2005)) which are almost exclusively less than 5 years old, my argument holds.
BTW I don't think the slashdot groupthink only opposes the "draconian enforcement and perpetual lengthening of copyright expiration." I do too, and disagree with Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), but that has nothing to do with the copyright enforcements currently brought by the RIAA/MPAA. Furthermore, I don't agree with their litigation/investigation tactics, but that's not relevant to the copyright itself.
Irrelevant. In a perfect world you wouldn't need copyright, either. Each user would pay something between the incremental cost (close to 0) and their personal benefit, or they won't use the creative work.
We're talking about the enforcement mechanism, and in particular, the law that allows both the netfilter author and the RIAA/MPAA to state a claim. Without copyright (or some similar idea written into a contract), there is no GPL. Period. See ESR's manifesto.
Note that I said "RIAA/MPAA copyrights," not tactics.
Now we will see the same people who oppose RIAA/MPAA copyrights cheering the copyright action that enforces open source. Don't you see that you can't have it both ways?
The delays that people experience before they die is driving many would-be inheriters to murder others or contract for their death. The problem is compounded by the fact that increasing medical costs for seniors is decreasing the available inheritence. According to a survey based on a sample of life expectancies and previous estates, generation X is waiting 8 to 10 years longer than previous generations for their inheritences. Those who believe they deserve such funds earlier have resorted to poisoning or even shooting their parents in a bid to preserve a larger portion of the estate and to obtain earlier access. Poor kids.
This has nothing to do with rights. This has to do with laws created to reward the rather expensive production of TV shows, which the networks choose to monetize in ways some people don't like.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
That's only a defense if you publish more than a year prior to the offender's date of invention, or as long as you're still working on the invention. See 35 USC 102(b) and (g).
I've been really annoyed lately at how bad patents get awarded and then litigated...
In real patent litigation, the main way to claim invalidity is 102(b). This says that if the work was published in a printed publication, or for sale in this country, more than one year prior to the filing date, then the patent is invalid. There are other grounds for invalidity, such as 103 (obviousness), but because of bad case law, obviousness is a very slight extension to 102(b) (hopefully this will be fixed with KSR v Teleflex, currently before the US Supreme Court). This one-year bar essentially means that as long as I'm within one year of being the first to do it, and I'm the first to file for a patent for it, then I'll win as long as no previous inventors filed for a patent. (We're a first-to-invent system with some caveats; if the first inventor doesn't try to patent it, he can lose his patent rights to a later inventor).
In technology, one year is a really long time, so its important that everyone files for patents lest something "obvious" be granted, and your competitor take away all your customers by claiming that your technology infringes their patent. Its way easier to solve this problem before the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences than it is before a judge and jury who have no technical knowledge whatsoever (and probably try patent cases once in a blue moon). Sure, if you lose in district court, you can always appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but by the time the appeal is litigated, you may have lost most of your customers.
Microsoft's doing the smart thing by filing for this patent. Hopefully they'll also do the right thing by not abusing it.
Whatever happened to sovereign immunity? Costs are typically not awarded against the United States under laws waiving sovereign immunity, and probably shouldn't be against the states either...
Pardon my ignorance as a novice in law, but since ND Cal is under the jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit, doesn't the parent poster's precedent trump the reference you just gave? (Sorry for my laziness, I'm in the middle of something and don't have time to read the opinions).
Who cares if it increases their sales? If it does it in a way that's contrary to the author's intent, then copyright law prohibits it. Consider someone who writes a book on the evils of the Internet and prohibits its contents from being shown on the Internet. Why should that hypothetical author accept Google posting their book? What if Google had fewer controls so that the entire book could be copied? Publishers that want Google to index can provide Google a license. Those who don't should be protected by law (and Google's use has serious problems under fair use doctrine, since the copied amount is the entire use, it impacts the marketability of reference works where only a few pages are needed at any time, it can be used to form a collection of works, and it is being commercially exploited.
The slashdottitude of "unauthorized copying of books/music/videos/software is just free marketing" is in direct contradiction to the letter and intent of modern copyright law, and even if it does help sales, that's a decision for the copyright holder to make.