My reading was the other way around, that Mr. Dickens invented it, but the actual IP belongs to M-D. As in the case of an employee who creates something, but the patent gets assigned to the employer.
In any case, all of this whining about absurd patents is a crock. This patent was published for review back in 1996, and was awared in 1998. If you really want to cut down on "absurd" patents, check out the USPTO and read their Gazette. They publish all of the patent filings. You might not find all of it online, and have to resort to paper. If you see an "absurd" patnet, challenge it!
I have to agree with your gripe about UPS. I live in Boston, and I'm a student. I don't have a car. If UPS delivers something, they always come by when I'm in class (naturally) and they'll only try to get it to you 3 times. And where is their distribution center? Far enough outside of the city that you need a car to get to it. At least the post office has a presence in every town.
Interesting vignette I heard about "The Jungle" (cannot determine it's accuracy, so YMMV). It seems Pres. Theodore Roosevelt read it, and had problems eating his breakfast sausages. Not a big surprise, if you've read it. And he did direct regulations on meat packing.
I know quite a few people who call themselves Libertarians. I cannot say if they are really Libertarians or not, it's not really my bag. I just wish more people would be "political practicalists" and do what is necessary to keep the world running without a lot of nigh-religious mumbo-jumbo.
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than that which their own strength and own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
-- Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, Part 1, chapter 13, para. 9 (ed. by Edwin Curry, 1994).
I think we can all agree that that is not what we want. I know that I'd like to keep my cable TV.;-)
Although I hate spam as much as anyone else, can we as conscience-wielding citizens actually state from the left side of our mouths that spam should be illegal while with the right side we state that there should be absolutely no restriction on internet communications?
Yes. Next combination of two unrelated issues?
Afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you on this point, Steve. The two points that nahdude812 made are related. Spam is a form of internet communication, albeit a noxious one (like me after eating Taco Hell). Nahdude is pointing out that most people here don't want any kind of restriction on the kinds of communications they can send on the internet, but yet they want to restrict one form of internet communication: spam. He calls it hypocrisy; I call it typical human behavior. Don't touch what I love, but squash that thing I hate.
In that thread I started (Anti-spam legislation is unnecessary) we did dance around the issue of judicial expansion of traditional law into the computer/internet sphere (oh lord, I'm starting to sound like a lawyer).
Nahdude has a point, even if you don't agree with it.
Found the cite. For those of you who are interested, the case is CompuServe Inc. v Cyber Promotions Inc., 962 F.Supp. 1015 (S.D.Ohio, Feb 03, 1997).
A synopsis from Westlaw (for educational use only:) reads:
Commercial online computer service brought action against company that was in business of sending unsolicited electronic mail (e-mail) advertisements to Internet users, claiming trespass to personal property or chattels. On plaintiff's application for preliminary injunction, the District Court, Graham, J., held that: (1) company's intentional use of service's proprietary computer equipment was actionable trespass to chattels for which First Amendment provided no defense, and (2) service was entitled to preliminary injunction enjoining company from sending unsolicited advertisements to any e-mail address maintained by service. Motion granted.
Spammers have already been held liable for spam in Federal court without any special legislation. Compuserve successfully argued traspass to chattels(1) in a case against Cyber Promotions Inc (don't have the cite on me). More legislation is not always a good thing, especially when it comes to computers and the Internet.
Do you really want Congress to regulate e-mail? Wasn't their last couple of attempts a good enough indication of what kind of law you'd get (COPA and CDA)?
(1) basically it means "you used my stuff without my permission"
I have a UMAX 738 notebook with an AMD K6/2(?)-380 chip. It's only got 32mb SDRAM (sodimm chips) so it's a little pokey when doing more than one thing at a time, but it's great for note taking in class (where I am now, heh) and it surfs the web handily too. I only notice it running hot when I run a game on it. I chose the UMAX because it was a couple hundred bucks less than the P2 based notebook my school was hawking.
You can either write law so that they can be read by Joe Blow, or you can write them in legalese with subclauses, sentences that go on for seeming years, etc etc. There's a good reason for it, however. Real "plain english" statutes are too vague and/or broad. By narrowing it down with sub-chapters, sub-headings, sub-parts, etc, the law extends only so far -- unless you have a judge who fancies himself an activist. Then of course, he can twist and wave his hands until he gets the result he wants. But then again, a lot of judges wave their hands so that they can fasion an equitable result from bad law. The common man is more likely to benefit than to lose from a little nudge. At least, I'd like to hope so.
Most judges and lawyers aren't the craven, self-serving jack-booted thugs people always seem to think they are. There are far more who are genuinely out to protect people's rights than the other way around. Of course, there are people on both sides of the USA political fence who essentially want to crush your rights. Conservatives do it for morality, liberals do it for "greater good". Same shit, different name, IMO.
Disclaimer: only a 3d year law student, don't rely on my statements as gospel. Especially if you haven't paid my fee!:)
Hell yeah! Deacon Jones kicks ass! I wish the USA channel (that's where I see it anyways, CYLL) didn't wimp out and bleep the dialog. What's so fricking offensive about saying "God-damn!" anyways? Unless of course, it's intentional. But it isn't clear to me if it is or not. Dunno.
No kidding. Last I checked, RH was always a for-profit company, just like any other. The difference is in what they sell and how they sell it.
Re:Reverse engineering and you!
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Most companies print their EULA on an insert that comes inside the box. The warning to read it is usually on a sticker on the media packaging itself. You open the little sleeve that the CDROM comes in and brother, you've just assented to the EULA terms whether or not you read 'em. Of course, I remember some software came shrinkwrapped in a box, then inside the EULA was shrinkwrapped in front of the disk(s). I also remember gleefully slicing open the nasty plastic to get to the goodies inside.
Cracking open the box itself isn't the problem; stores usually have a machine that'll let them re-wrap opened boxes. But if you open up that jewel case/paper sleeve/plastic wrapping around the media and go straight for the install, you've just accepted a license that might well bite you in the ass.
Re:The Difficulty of Overstating the Case
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Too bad this is on page 4, it should have been moderated up to a (4, Insightful) by now.
Re:Lawyer: Repeat after me: "It's not a law."
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What about giving each other state's laws full faith and credit? If it's legal to send the repo order in Washington (home of MS), doesn't Nevada have to give that full faith and credit? Or does that only apply to a judgment from the WA court? And if MS did go into WA state court and get an order allowing them to repo a license for WinNT in NV, wouldn't they be able to despite NV's criminalization of the remote repo?
Re:Argument in favor of warez?
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A lot of people seem to be under the impression that if you don't sign something, you're not bound by anything.
And those people are wrong.
You can give your assent to a license in any manner of ways, not the least of which is registering your product, filling out those little forms, and simply using the product. UCITA will let the vendor write in the EULA a little line like "USAGE OF THE PRODUCT WILL BE CONSIDERED ASSENT TO THE TERMS IN THE EULA."
As for the 53 members of the NCCUSL, it's the 50 states, Puerto Rico, DeeCee and the US Virgin Islands.
licensing, transferring and R-E'ing
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Regarding licensing: No, they have in UCITA Part 1, Subpart B, section 112 which states in part:
(a)A person manifests assent to a record or term if the person, acting with knowledge of, or after having an opportunity to review the record or term or a copy of it: ... (2) intentionally engages in conduct or makes statements with reason to know that the other party or its electronic agent may infer from the conduct or statement that the person assents to the record or term. ... (d) Conduct or operations manifesting assent may be proved in any manner, including a showing that a procedure existed by which a person or an electronic agent must have engaged in the conduct or operations in order to obtain, or to proceed with use of the information or informational rights. Proof of assent depends on the circumstances. Proof of compliance with subsection (a)(2) is sufficient if there is conduct that assents and subsequent conduct that electronically reaffirms assent.
This gives vendors a ton of wiggle room in order to say "hey! you assented to the license!"
Regarding license transfer: What you refer to is called the "doctrine of first sale" in legal jargon. However, UCITA aims to remove software from the doctrine of first sale by making it so that you never "own" the software, you just have limited license rights for use of the software. If you buy a book, the copyright holder (or its agents) sell you it, but they can't prevent you from turning around and selling it again, or even giving it away should you so choose. If, however, you only hold a license, you are restricted from transferring that software under the terms of the license. And those terms can be as painful as the company can craft them, so long as they aren't "unconscionable". And one judge's definition of unconscionable is different than anothers.
On reverse engineering: The curent method of R-E is known as the "clean room technique". I disassemble the program, write a spec for it, then hand off the spec to a 3d party who hasn't touched the disassembled code. That is how the original IBM BIOS was R-E'd. UCITA would allow the license agreement to specifically disallow R-E in section 307. Currently, federal trade secret laws do not disallow R-E. This is a nice end-run around that.
Unfortunately your confidence in the wisdom of the courts is misplaced. Should a majority of states pass this proposed legislation, we could be looking at a decade or more of protracted litigation to overturn this. In the interim the only people who will benefit are the makers of over-the-counter pain relievers as we try to get rid of our large headaches.
Reverse engineering and you!
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They included a "choice of law" section in there. That means, any dispute is covered by their choice of jurisdiction. You buy the product, poen the shinkwrap and VOILA! You have assented to a contract with the vendor that is governed by the laws of a state that lets the vendor repossess your firstborn if you look at the 'ware cross-eyed.
(not a lawyer, worse, a law student)
Could be worse... but it'd be hard
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Law Student here..
"Illegal Search and Seizure" applies only to the actions of the government. Your US Constitutional right to not have the gummint come in and take your cookies (or house soldiers in your basement, etc etc) without paying you for them/it/whatever. In the case of a software vendor and the end-user, you're into the realm of private law, and in private law, as long as it doesn't violate whatever jurisdiction's definition of "public interest", just about anything goes. (Obviously, contracts to do criminal acts can't be upheld in court. Duh.)
Unfortunately, in my perusal of the links, I couldn't find out which states voted what way. Could someone post a list if they find it? I'm going to try to get the word out amongst the techo-savvy law profs at my school (yes, some do exist).
Government for, by and of the people only works if the people put down the frickin' remote control long enough to do something.
IIRC, if you grant too liberal a license, you lose your copyright. That's what happens in patents and trademarks, anyways. I believe the jargon for it is "naked licensing".
If you look at the bottom of every/. page, you'll see "Comments are owned by the Poster", essentially meaning all rights to the post are reserved by the poster. This is usually how things are done. I don't recall ever seeing a scheme like the Technocrat one, although it appears to be a hybrid with the traditional print media and (for lack of a better descriptor) the/. model. Print media has always had their little disclaimer ("All letters submitted to us become our property, yadda yadda.") which basically strips the original writer of rights to the writing.
It would be interesting to see how a court resolved a copyright dispute under the Technocrat scheme.
Re: #4. The hard truth is that minor children have little to no civil liberties. About all you can hope for is not to get abused or neglected physically. There's no law that says children get any sort of privacy.
And just make sure your Constitutional Law prof is good. Mine nearly put me to sleep (define irony: a Brit teaching ConLaw at a US law school).
I must say that Mr. Frey makes some excellent points. My main problem with the cable companies is that I can't switch providers by any other method than a physical move. To be blunt, that sucks ass.
As for the contention that no one would invest in "common carrier" cable infrastructure because someone else could come along and "steal" that investment, I'm quite sure that some enterprising businessman would get the idea to lay down a cable infrastructure then lease his entire bandwidth out to competing companies. Why bother run your own cableco and worry about content when you can let others do all that work and just collect the rent?
Hell, you'd hardly even have to do maintenance, it's not like my cable company actually does anything that I can see;-)
Over two dozen books ordered and delivered and nary a problem yet (with three ordered Monday;-).
It's not so hard to avoid the stuff you don't want to see on Amazon. Hell, I hardly even read the front page. I hit the search box and go a-looking for the book(s) that I want. So what if they sell gewgaws and whatzits now; is it really going to matter if they have a sale on Pokemon if I can still order my books? And if they don't have it in stock, there are at least a half dozen other places to order from.
In your case (the previous poster, that is) I would have canceled the order once I got the incorrect book and gone somehwere else, if I hadn't already done so after a week of waiting for a "24 hour" book. Shit happens, ya know.
At that particular bank branch, there were two ATMs located inside the building with the one drive thru. The ones inside didn't have braille on the keypad, only the drive-thru one. So much for redundency.
Slashdot Mirror
My reading was the other way around, that Mr. Dickens invented it, but the actual IP belongs to M-D. As in the case of an employee who creates something, but the patent gets assigned to the employer.
In any case, all of this whining about absurd patents is a crock. This patent was published for review back in 1996, and was awared in 1998. If you really want to cut down on "absurd" patents, check out the USPTO and read their Gazette. They publish all of the patent filings. You might not find all of it online, and have to resort to paper. If you see an "absurd" patnet, challenge it!
I have to agree with your gripe about UPS. I live in Boston, and I'm a student. I don't have a car. If UPS delivers something, they always come by when I'm in class (naturally) and they'll only try to get it to you 3 times. And where is their distribution center? Far enough outside of the city that you need a car to get to it. At least the post office has a presence in every town.
I know quite a few people who call themselves Libertarians. I cannot say if they are really Libertarians or not, it's not really my bag. I just wish more people would be "political practicalists" and do what is necessary to keep the world running without a lot of nigh-religious mumbo-jumbo.
-- Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, Part 1, chapter 13, para. 9 (ed. by Edwin Curry, 1994).
I think we can all agree that that is not what we want. I know that I'd like to keep my cable TV.
They already can sue on the theory that the spam is a trespass to their property. Why reinvent the wheel?
Afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you on this point, Steve. The two points that nahdude812 made are related. Spam is a form of internet communication, albeit a noxious one (like me after eating Taco Hell). Nahdude is pointing out that most people here don't want any kind of restriction on the kinds of communications they can send on the internet, but yet they want to restrict one form of internet communication: spam. He calls it hypocrisy; I call it typical human behavior. Don't touch what I love, but squash that thing I hate.
In that thread I started (Anti-spam legislation is unnecessary) we did dance around the issue of judicial expansion of traditional law into the computer/internet sphere (oh lord, I'm starting to sound like a lawyer).
Nahdude has a point, even if you don't agree with it.
A synopsis from Westlaw (for educational use only
Do you really want Congress to regulate e-mail? Wasn't their last couple of attempts a good enough indication of what kind of law you'd get (COPA and CDA)?
(1) basically it means "you used my stuff without my permission"
I have a UMAX 738 notebook with an AMD K6/2(?)-380 chip. It's only got 32mb SDRAM (sodimm chips) so it's a little pokey when doing more than one thing at a time, but it's great for note taking in class (where I am now, heh) and it surfs the web handily too. I only notice it running hot when I run a game on it. I chose the UMAX because it was a couple hundred bucks less than the P2 based notebook my school was hawking.
:)
Besides, it's got a nice black case
Most judges and lawyers aren't the craven, self-serving jack-booted thugs people always seem to think they are. There are far more who are genuinely out to protect people's rights than the other way around. Of course, there are people on both sides of the USA political fence who essentially want to crush your rights. Conservatives do it for morality, liberals do it for "greater good". Same shit, different name, IMO.
Disclaimer: only a 3d year law student, don't rely on my statements as gospel. Especially if you haven't paid my fee!
Love that Volvo.
Wordperfect. Coincidence?
No kidding. Last I checked, RH was always a for-profit company, just like any other. The difference is in what they sell and how they sell it.
Cracking open the box itself isn't the problem; stores usually have a machine that'll let them re-wrap opened boxes. But if you open up that jewel case/paper sleeve/plastic wrapping around the media and go straight for the install, you've just accepted a license that might well bite you in the ass.
Too bad this is on page 4, it should have been moderated up to a (4, Insightful) by now.
What about giving each other state's laws full faith and credit? If it's legal to send the repo order in Washington (home of MS), doesn't Nevada have to give that full faith and credit? Or does that only apply to a judgment from the WA court? And if MS did go into WA state court and get an order allowing them to repo a license for WinNT in NV, wouldn't they be able to despite NV's criminalization of the remote repo?
And those people are wrong.
You can give your assent to a license in any manner of ways, not the least of which is registering your product, filling out those little forms, and simply using the product. UCITA will let the vendor write in the EULA a little line like "USAGE OF THE PRODUCT WILL BE CONSIDERED ASSENT TO THE TERMS IN THE EULA."
As for the 53 members of the NCCUSL, it's the 50 states, Puerto Rico, DeeCee and the US Virgin Islands.
This gives vendors a ton of wiggle room in order to say "hey! you assented to the license!"
Regarding license transfer: What you refer to is called the "doctrine of first sale" in legal jargon. However, UCITA aims to remove software from the doctrine of first sale by making it so that you never "own" the software, you just have limited license rights for use of the software. If you buy a book, the copyright holder (or its agents) sell you it, but they can't prevent you from turning around and selling it again, or even giving it away should you so choose. If, however, you only hold a license, you are restricted from transferring that software under the terms of the license. And those terms can be as painful as the company can craft them, so long as they aren't "unconscionable". And one judge's definition of unconscionable is different than anothers.
On reverse engineering: The curent method of R-E is known as the "clean room technique". I disassemble the program, write a spec for it, then hand off the spec to a 3d party who hasn't touched the disassembled code. That is how the original IBM BIOS was R-E'd. UCITA would allow the license agreement to specifically disallow R-E in section 307. Currently, federal trade secret laws do not disallow R-E. This is a nice end-run around that.
Unfortunately your confidence in the wisdom of the courts is misplaced. Should a majority of states pass this proposed legislation, we could be looking at a decade or more of protracted litigation to overturn this. In the interim the only people who will benefit are the makers of over-the-counter pain relievers as we try to get rid of our large headaches.
(not a lawyer, worse, a law student)
"Illegal Search and Seizure" applies only to the actions of the government. Your US Constitutional right to not have the gummint come in and take your cookies (or house soldiers in your basement, etc etc) without paying you for them/it/whatever. In the case of a software vendor and the end-user, you're into the realm of private law, and in private law, as long as it doesn't violate whatever jurisdiction's definition of "public interest", just about anything goes. (Obviously, contracts to do criminal acts can't be upheld in court. Duh.)
Unfortunately, in my perusal of the links, I couldn't find out which states voted what way. Could someone post a list if they find it? I'm going to try to get the word out amongst the techo-savvy law profs at my school (yes, some do exist).
Government for, by and of the people only works if the people put down the frickin' remote control long enough to do something.
If you look at the bottom of every
It would be interesting to see how a court resolved a copyright dispute under the Technocrat scheme.
IANALOALS
And just make sure your Constitutional Law prof is good. Mine nearly put me to sleep (define irony: a Brit teaching ConLaw at a US law school).
As for the contention that no one would invest in "common carrier" cable infrastructure because someone else could come along and "steal" that investment, I'm quite sure that some enterprising businessman would get the idea to lay down a cable infrastructure then lease his entire bandwidth out to competing companies. Why bother run your own cableco and worry about content when you can let others do all that work and just collect the rent?
Hell, you'd hardly even have to do maintenance, it's not like my cable company actually does anything that I can see
Gak! Waterstone's closed it's Boston store? Damn, that was a nice store, even if I didn't get to it very often.
It's not so hard to avoid the stuff you don't want to see on Amazon. Hell, I hardly even read the front page. I hit the search box and go a-looking for the book(s) that I want. So what if they sell gewgaws and whatzits now; is it really going to matter if they have a sale on Pokemon if I can still order my books? And if they don't have it in stock, there are at least a half dozen other places to order from.
In your case (the previous poster, that is) I would have canceled the order once I got the incorrect book and gone somehwere else, if I hadn't already done so after a week of waiting for a "24 hour" book. Shit happens, ya know.
At that particular bank branch, there were two ATMs located inside the building with the one drive thru. The ones inside didn't have braille on the keypad, only the drive-thru one. So much for redundency.