Every time I've tangled with a lawyer who disagreed with me I've beaten him to a pulp.
Lawyers tend to think as you do, that because they're lawyers they can be sloppy with their facts and arguments and win by force majeure or by casting spells of bufuddlement.
I'm smarter and mentally tougher than the average layman, and know a bit more about the law, legal procedure, and the craft of lawyering than they expect, so they trap themselves with overconfidence and then lose on the merits.
On the other hand, the one time I've left everything up to the lawyer, the judge actually stopped the proceeding, pointed out his mistakes, and told me what to do to get a result in my best interests. So just walking into your lawyer's office and giving him control is as big a mistake as ignoring his advice.
But we don't know what would have happened to Gandalf if he'd had to destroy it himself.
His intentions in gaining it to destroy it would be honorable, but clearly it doesn't want to be destroyed, and it is very powerful in changing its owner's mind to get what it wants.
Gandalf knew that. Hence the need to send a less-dangerous-when-corrupted individual to peform the task.
So Ceglia can still be Gandalf, making a different choice this time.
As for Zuckerberg, he's more of a Smeagol than a Sauron. I mean, he's got it, and look what it's done to him.
It's because the legal system allows it to happen.
Of course you can instantly see the conflict of interest there, since it's the lawyers, who become judges and legislators, who make the decisions about how the legal system will work.
A good judge will direct lawyers to stipulate their agreement to obvious facts, but even that isn't foolproof, and there are a lot of ignorant judges.
The use of precedent stifles a lot of argumentative retracting of history, and generally keeps the law consistent. But slight differences between this case and the precedents may unzip any number of issues for argument. Once a case is opened the disagreement about the smallest details and tiniest bits of evidence can be expanded to soak up all of the money available,
And there's little a defendant or plaintiff can do about it. He can fire his attorneys, but since that means starting over it rarely seems the economical choice. Or he can sue them after the fact for various forms of sandbagging or incompetence or malpractice, but that also rarely seems to be an economical strategy.
If I own the content, and you want the content, you pay me for the content. You don't copy it from someone else unless you've paid me, and you don't make copies of it without paying me, and you don't sell copies of it that you haven't paid me for.
There are exceptions to this, some called fair use, but stealing a whole copy of it to be used as part of your business is not that.
Stealing an idea doesn't make the company the property of the person with the idea. It might give that person rights to some back-payment of royalties, but that'd be it.
This is a contract that gives Ceglia 50-84% of the company itself, based on developing the idea.
They'll be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees, no matter how long it takes. And they can offer to work on contingency.
If they believe it's righteous, they won't let anyone offer him X million. It's going to be a big chunk of the company, or it's going to go to court.
In truth, depending on what the VCs own, it may end up being only a big chunk of Zuckerberg's personal share of the company.
Though the fact that Zuckerberg may not have had the right to enter into deals with the VCs, since Ceglia may be the true owner of the company, may end up costing Zuckerberg all of his nut.
Contracts don't need to be written by lawyers to be legally binding.
No, but it helps. A lot.
Lawyers know what things have to be in a contract to make it a contract. IANAL, so a little wikipedia check (ymmv) shows it's these things:
* Agreement (Offer and Acceptance)
* Capacity to contract
* Consideration
* Legal purpose
* Legality of form
* Intention to create legal relations
* Consent to contract
* Vitiating factors: Mistates, undue influence, misrepresentation, duress
If Ceglia covered all of those things in this one, then he's got a valid contract and is going to score.
if he missed even one, or if he failed to carry out some of them, then he's going to become a trivia question.
From the claims he's made, it sounds like he has the basics down. It's claimed the thing was signed, so the offer was made and accepted (in fact, it sounds like Zuckerberg made the offer). Capacity: if Zuckerberg was 18 and owned the website, that's enough. Consideration: Ceglia traded money for ownership rights; so both sides got value from the deal, and fair value at the time, plus the agreed-upon increase in ownership as the project was delayed. Purpose and form: simple trade of cash for ownership; an investment; happens all the time without event. Intention to create legal relations: it's not as though anyone was forced or tricked into this. Consent: Zuckerberg was the one who entered into the deal.
So it's down to what wikipedia calls Vitiating Factors, and that's where his lawyer is going to go. Things like the amount of time Ceglia waited, any informalities or irregularities in the documents, etc. And really, given the current value that Ceglia is chasing and Zuckerberg stands to lose, lawyers can find a lot of potentially vitiating circumstances to tie up the case in court.
The judge who gets the case first may skip all that and render summary judgment based on the hard evidence. Which I haven't seen so I won't play judge, yet.
Hopefully Zuckerberg will realize he's actually bound to comply with his agreement, and will find a way to settle with Ceglia. I doubt Ceglia will take less than 50%, but I won't be surprised if he takes that if he's offered it, and let the production delays slide. Unless he's hung up on a few $billion here and there...
Grass is not a book. It took me a week to grow that grass from seed. Seed I dind't have to invent. Seed I bought. Regardless, it is my property, and stealing it makes you a thief.
If I did invent the seed, and it was valuable to someone, and you stole one of the seeds from me, you bet your thieving ass I'd be coming at you with a phalanx of lawyers and cops, especially if the law says that my failure to protect my rights to the seed causes my rights to lapse.
Copyright is a valid right. Stealing a book, no matter your excuse, and no matter how many trillions of copies someone can produce on a computer in a few seconds, is not a valid right.
No, I am saying that if they choose to use a copy of the work as a means of automatically ensuring compliance with the law, then they have to pay for that copy.
There are other means to comply with the law. They don't have to break the law in one way to comply with it in another.
Scribd possessed a copy of a book that they did not pay for, and using it as part of a software program.
That's grounds for a lawsuit.
Whether it "saved" the author money is moot. They could have saved the author money by manually examining uploaded content, instead of by using a pirated copy in their software.
Meghrabi killed hundreds of people, and the Scottish government fucked up his punishment. That's worthy of the President's attention.
This dope hacked into some computers and nobody got killed. It's not worthy of the President's time to dick around in the legal filigree on this. At the point where it's no longer mechanistic and it seems the British government is fucking with America over the case, then it may be necessary to make a formal request from the White House to straighten it out.
the touchscreen isn't that bad. and the visuals of the screen (at the time) kicked the iPhone into the mud.
i've never had a problem with the notification light. have no idea what you mean about google not making it work. when i get notifications of any kind, it blinks every few seconds. just what it's supposed to do.
And, honestly, I couldn't play with one before stroking a check for $600.
Exactly my point in my earlier post. It's not that you didn't have the money or the desire, it's that you couldn't work around the things you were told were bad about it by holding it in your hand and feeling its silky tactile coating, looking at the lustre on the stained titanium, being sucked into the inky blackness turning into brilliant light in its face, spelunking its pages and menus and widgets and apps (which would run simulaneous with each other, unlike any iPhone could do until last month)...
You'd have bought one, despite the publicity of its few flaws, if you'd seen it in action.
Which raises the question of why Google doesn't just stock them in T-mobile stores. And the answer is somewhat simple: T-mobile hates the Nexus One. They got into the deal, and then realized they were going to have to work to activate them all, but weren't going to get 2-year contracts out of many of them. And they were going to have to field every technical call first, because when the phone goes wrong, who calls HTC first, and who can get through to Google? Nightmare for the carrier's average profit margin per handset sold.
Google doesn't want to just be a brand name on the back of a handset made by HTC and sold through T-mobile franchisees. It wanted to add that "you own it outright" to the business model. And it probably can't get that from T-mobile any more, and no other carrier went within a mile of it.
And then there's the issue of this being Google's first attempt at being a hardware company, and the hardware business is a right royal pain in the ass compared to software. Someone needs software? email it to them or let them click a button to download it, or just enable their handset to pull it and install it automatically. Someone needs a new handset? Call HTC who calls their sub in China who checks inventory and says they got none. Call your suppy chain contractor who checks their invoices and says yeah, we got fitty gross, but they're on a boat in the Strait of Hormuz; you want we fedex you one from the destination and you can reship to the customer? Only cost $400 to crack the container on the dock... another nightmare no code monkey ever wanted to deal with.
Schmidt knew things like the Droid were coming. He's spinning.
Google wanted to make money on phones and have control of a device for its OS. It wanted to be like Apple, making $jilions on the iPhone, but with more user and developer freedom. It's spinning now, taking success where it can get it, and claiming that getting its ass beat by other phones using the same OS was what it meant to do all along.
The online-sales model would have worked fine except for one thing: the phones didn't work very well for a lot of people. Because of that, people interested in them would have needed first-hand experience with other features of the phone to get that it's still pretty cool even if it's middling for signal and 3G connectivity.
The combination of features worthy of trepidation and a lack of a way to alleviate that trepidation led to a lack of sales.
Love my N1. Sorry to see it's going to go into EOL hell. Probably never see an Android 3 update for it (please reply if you know otherwise). But, I bought it outright, and I have no contract on it, so I know I won't lose anything more than opportunity cost if I switch to another phone. Which will, without question, be running Android, and will, in all probability, also be made by HTC.
I have no idea why the title of this thread is what it is, but I'm certain it's for an unconscionably stupid reason bordering on or diving deeply into trolling.
I don't want to read it. Suffice it to say that I could refute the reasoning. So just consider it nullified and move on.
It's somewhat certain that there are stars larger than this one, even if they're wayyyyyyy out on the long tail of the distribution, which itself drops off like a cliff somewhere beyond this one due to the nonlinearity of the processes occurring in larger stars (they tend to explode-implode into your darker dwarves and holes).
But it's also almost certain that we won't detect one of them for a long time, since, as you nearly pointed out, astronomy budgets are somewhat wee compared to the size of the universe.
So you confuse existence with discovery. Something more likely than anything else we've been discussing, really.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I've tangled with a lawyer who disagreed with me I've beaten him to a pulp.
Lawyers tend to think as you do, that because they're lawyers they can be sloppy with their facts and arguments and win by force majeure or by casting spells of bufuddlement.
I'm smarter and mentally tougher than the average layman, and know a bit more about the law, legal procedure, and the craft of lawyering than they expect, so they trap themselves with overconfidence and then lose on the merits.
On the other hand, the one time I've left everything up to the lawyer, the judge actually stopped the proceeding, pointed out his mistakes, and told me what to do to get a result in my best interests. So just walking into your lawyer's office and giving him control is as big a mistake as ignoring his advice.
If you take legal advice from people on slashdot even if they claim to be a lawyer you are an idiot.
Thanks for the advice!
Conversely, if you take idiotic advice from people on /. you are a lawyer.
But we don't know what would have happened to Gandalf if he'd had to destroy it himself.
His intentions in gaining it to destroy it would be honorable, but clearly it doesn't want to be destroyed, and it is very powerful in changing its owner's mind to get what it wants.
Gandalf knew that. Hence the need to send a less-dangerous-when-corrupted individual to peform the task.
So Ceglia can still be Gandalf, making a different choice this time.
As for Zuckerberg, he's more of a Smeagol than a Sauron. I mean, he's got it, and look what it's done to him.
It's because the legal system allows it to happen.
Of course you can instantly see the conflict of interest there, since it's the lawyers, who become judges and legislators, who make the decisions about how the legal system will work.
A good judge will direct lawyers to stipulate their agreement to obvious facts, but even that isn't foolproof, and there are a lot of ignorant judges.
The use of precedent stifles a lot of argumentative retracting of history, and generally keeps the law consistent. But slight differences between this case and the precedents may unzip any number of issues for argument. Once a case is opened the disagreement about the smallest details and tiniest bits of evidence can be expanded to soak up all of the money available,
And there's little a defendant or plaintiff can do about it. He can fire his attorneys, but since that means starting over it rarely seems the economical choice. Or he can sue them after the fact for various forms of sandbagging or incompetence or malpractice, but that also rarely seems to be an economical strategy.
It's not the industry, it's the law.
If I own the content, and you want the content, you pay me for the content. You don't copy it from someone else unless you've paid me, and you don't make copies of it without paying me, and you don't sell copies of it that you haven't paid me for.
There are exceptions to this, some called fair use, but stealing a whole copy of it to be used as part of your business is not that.
You have the right to watch Facebook's ostensible founder go up in flames, online.
Minus the part he already sold to his other investors, minus what they'll sue him for once the judge takes some of that back to give it to Ceglia...
Zuckerberg could end up deep in debt after this.
Stealing an idea doesn't make the company the property of the person with the idea. It might give that person rights to some back-payment of royalties, but that'd be it.
This is a contract that gives Ceglia 50-84% of the company itself, based on developing the idea.
Depends on his lawyers more than him.
They'll be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees, no matter how long it takes. And they can offer to work on contingency.
If they believe it's righteous, they won't let anyone offer him X million. It's going to be a big chunk of the company, or it's going to go to court.
In truth, depending on what the VCs own, it may end up being only a big chunk of Zuckerberg's personal share of the company.
Though the fact that Zuckerberg may not have had the right to enter into deals with the VCs, since Ceglia may be the true owner of the company, may end up costing Zuckerberg all of his nut.
This isn't going away for 8 figures.
Contracts don't need to be written by lawyers to be legally binding.
No, but it helps. A lot.
Lawyers know what things have to be in a contract to make it a contract. IANAL, so a little wikipedia check (ymmv) shows it's these things:
* Agreement (Offer and Acceptance)
* Capacity to contract
* Consideration
* Legal purpose
* Legality of form
* Intention to create legal relations
* Consent to contract
* Vitiating factors: Mistates, undue influence, misrepresentation, duress
If Ceglia covered all of those things in this one, then he's got a valid contract and is going to score.
if he missed even one, or if he failed to carry out some of them, then he's going to become a trivia question.
From the claims he's made, it sounds like he has the basics down. It's claimed the thing was signed, so the offer was made and accepted (in fact, it sounds like Zuckerberg made the offer). Capacity: if Zuckerberg was 18 and owned the website, that's enough. Consideration: Ceglia traded money for ownership rights; so both sides got value from the deal, and fair value at the time, plus the agreed-upon increase in ownership as the project was delayed. Purpose and form: simple trade of cash for ownership; an investment; happens all the time without event. Intention to create legal relations: it's not as though anyone was forced or tricked into this. Consent: Zuckerberg was the one who entered into the deal.
So it's down to what wikipedia calls Vitiating Factors, and that's where his lawyer is going to go. Things like the amount of time Ceglia waited, any informalities or irregularities in the documents, etc. And really, given the current value that Ceglia is chasing and Zuckerberg stands to lose, lawyers can find a lot of potentially vitiating circumstances to tie up the case in court.
The judge who gets the case first may skip all that and render summary judgment based on the hard evidence. Which I haven't seen so I won't play judge, yet.
Hopefully Zuckerberg will realize he's actually bound to comply with his agreement, and will find a way to settle with Ceglia. I doubt Ceglia will take less than 50%, but I won't be surprised if he takes that if he's offered it, and let the production delays slide. Unless he's hung up on a few $billion here and there...
The only thing "wrong" with it is that fools like you don't understand it.
Grass is not a book. It took me a week to grow that grass from seed. Seed I dind't have to invent. Seed I bought. Regardless, it is my property, and stealing it makes you a thief.
If I did invent the seed, and it was valuable to someone, and you stole one of the seeds from me, you bet your thieving ass I'd be coming at you with a phalanx of lawyers and cops, especially if the law says that my failure to protect my rights to the seed causes my rights to lapse.
Copyright is a valid right. Stealing a book, no matter your excuse, and no matter how many trillions of copies someone can produce on a computer in a few seconds, is not a valid right.
Get it now?
No, I am saying that if they choose to use a copy of the work as a means of automatically ensuring compliance with the law, then they have to pay for that copy.
There are other means to comply with the law. They don't have to break the law in one way to comply with it in another.
I don't own the air. You're free to breathe it in. Just don't breathe it out at me if you have a disease.
When I access slashdot I grant you a license to the bandwidth needed to read your post.
If every blade of grass remains on your lawn, what was stolen?
If you haven't taken one, you haven't stolen one.
Captcha: "Imbecile" No shit.
There's a reason you refused to sign your post.
Scribd possessed a copy of a book that they did not pay for, and using it as part of a software program.
That's grounds for a lawsuit.
Whether it "saved" the author money is moot. They could have saved the author money by manually examining uploaded content, instead of by using a pirated copy in their software.
Abundance has ZERO to do with ownership.
Stealing a blade of grass off my lawn makes you a thief.
Got it?
Now, get off it.
Meghrabi killed hundreds of people, and the Scottish government fucked up his punishment. That's worthy of the President's attention.
This dope hacked into some computers and nobody got killed. It's not worthy of the President's time to dick around in the legal filigree on this. At the point where it's no longer mechanistic and it seems the British government is fucking with America over the case, then it may be necessary to make a formal request from the White House to straighten it out.
the touchscreen isn't that bad. and the visuals of the screen (at the time) kicked the iPhone into the mud.
i've never had a problem with the notification light. have no idea what you mean about google not making it work. when i get notifications of any kind, it blinks every few seconds. just what it's supposed to do.
And, honestly, I couldn't play with one before stroking a check for $600.
Exactly my point in my earlier post. It's not that you didn't have the money or the desire, it's that you couldn't work around the things you were told were bad about it by holding it in your hand and feeling its silky tactile coating, looking at the lustre on the stained titanium, being sucked into the inky blackness turning into brilliant light in its face, spelunking its pages and menus and widgets and apps (which would run simulaneous with each other, unlike any iPhone could do until last month)...
You'd have bought one, despite the publicity of its few flaws, if you'd seen it in action.
Which raises the question of why Google doesn't just stock them in T-mobile stores. And the answer is somewhat simple: T-mobile hates the Nexus One. They got into the deal, and then realized they were going to have to work to activate them all, but weren't going to get 2-year contracts out of many of them. And they were going to have to field every technical call first, because when the phone goes wrong, who calls HTC first, and who can get through to Google? Nightmare for the carrier's average profit margin per handset sold.
Google doesn't want to just be a brand name on the back of a handset made by HTC and sold through T-mobile franchisees. It wanted to add that "you own it outright" to the business model. And it probably can't get that from T-mobile any more, and no other carrier went within a mile of it.
And then there's the issue of this being Google's first attempt at being a hardware company, and the hardware business is a right royal pain in the ass compared to software. Someone needs software? email it to them or let them click a button to download it, or just enable their handset to pull it and install it automatically. Someone needs a new handset? Call HTC who calls their sub in China who checks inventory and says they got none. Call your suppy chain contractor who checks their invoices and says yeah, we got fitty gross, but they're on a boat in the Strait of Hormuz; you want we fedex you one from the destination and you can reship to the customer? Only cost $400 to crack the container on the dock... another nightmare no code monkey ever wanted to deal with.
Schmidt knew things like the Droid were coming. He's spinning.
Google wanted to make money on phones and have control of a device for its OS. It wanted to be like Apple, making $jilions on the iPhone, but with more user and developer freedom. It's spinning now, taking success where it can get it, and claiming that getting its ass beat by other phones using the same OS was what it meant to do all along.
The online-sales model would have worked fine except for one thing: the phones didn't work very well for a lot of people. Because of that, people interested in them would have needed first-hand experience with other features of the phone to get that it's still pretty cool even if it's middling for signal and 3G connectivity.
The combination of features worthy of trepidation and a lack of a way to alleviate that trepidation led to a lack of sales.
Love my N1. Sorry to see it's going to go into EOL hell. Probably never see an Android 3 update for it (please reply if you know otherwise). But, I bought it outright, and I have no contract on it, so I know I won't lose anything more than opportunity cost if I switch to another phone. Which will, without question, be running Android, and will, in all probability, also be made by HTC.
US courts have ordered many services to implement filtering systems
Really?
I'd think they'd just order services not to allow infringing content, and leave the means up to the service.
I have no idea why the title of this thread is what it is, but I'm certain it's for an unconscionably stupid reason bordering on or diving deeply into trolling.
I don't want to read it. Suffice it to say that I could refute the reasoning. So just consider it nullified and move on.
If you bought the copy you were using in your filter, then you did the right thing.
If you scanned it, or kept one of the illegal uploads as a template, then you hurt the people who didn't get paid for the copy.
Except that your #1 is not the facts of the case.
The site was using an unauthorized copy of the work to check for other unauthorized copies.
Stealing a car to look for stolen cars doesn't make you a cop.
The deposition goes like so:
Plaintiff's attorney: Are you blocking users from uploading content belonging to my client?
Defendant: Yes.
Plaintiff's attorney: How?
Defendant: We compare uploaded items to a copy of the book on our server.
Plaintiff's attorney: I see. And did you pay for it?
Defendant: What?
Plaintiff's attorney: This book, that you have on your server.
Defendant: Uh, yes. We bought it at Borders and scanned it in.
Plaintiff's attorney: Did you buy a license to make an electronic copy of the hardcopy you purchased?
Defendant: A what?
Plaintiff's attorney: (makes a note).
Defendant: Aw, shit.
You makee mistakee.
It's somewhat certain that there are stars larger than this one, even if they're wayyyyyyy out on the long tail of the distribution, which itself drops off like a cliff somewhere beyond this one due to the nonlinearity of the processes occurring in larger stars (they tend to explode-implode into your darker dwarves and holes).
But it's also almost certain that we won't detect one of them for a long time, since, as you nearly pointed out, astronomy budgets are somewhat wee compared to the size of the universe.
So you confuse existence with discovery. Something more likely than anything else we've been discussing, really.