No, it does refer to how many different books it sells. At least that was the claim when Barnes & Noble sued them -- B&N was upset because although Amazon sold that many books, it didn't actually have them in stock, so it wasn't that large of a bookstore after all.
I don't claim that Amazon has all the books ever printed, just that if you pick a random book, you have a much better chance of finding it at Amazon.com than you do at your local book nook.
In any case, most book nooks do actually sell "mainstream/NYT bestseller books." In fact, sales of those books compose a large part of their sales. The book nook, after all, operates in the same market that amazon does -- when most people want mainstream books, it has to give them what they want or they go out of business. The idea of the local bookstore as purveyor of dusty hard-to-find and out-of-print books smelling of cigars and days-gone-by, lost treasures waiting for the diligent soul to rediscover them, is generally a romantic myth. There is, after all, a reason that such books are hard-to-find and out-of-print: not many people want them. And, it's hard to profitably run a brick & mortar business selling things that not many people want.
Beg pardon? Amazon is, after all, the world's biggest bookstore. You're much more likely to find something out-of-the-mainstream at Amazon than you are at your local bookstore. Heck, if that weren't the case, people who want out-of-the-mainstream books would continue to shop at the local bookstores, who would not be threatened by Amazon at all.
The only "culture" at risk here is the culture of inefficient small bookstores.
The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.
You can't copy the designs, but once the building has been constructed, you can do what you want to with the pictures.
In any case, they're claiming trademark and trade dress infringment. The easiest way around that is a prominent disclaimer saying that you have nothing to do with the Ford Motor Company. Trademark is all around consumer confusion -- once you negate the confusion, you're generally not infringing. (Ignore the doctrine of "tarnishing" for the moment, which doesn't seem to apply here.)
Whichever route you choose. closed or open source, you need to evaluate your prospects. Are you capable of selling and maintaining it? Writing the code is necessary, but not enough to make money: do you have potential customers? How much work is going to be required to support it? Do you have enough time to do that? If you keep it closed-source, do you have the means to enforce your copyright? Have you written the documentation that goes along with it? Have you fully tested it?
Running a business is not a trivial undertaking -- you have to deal with licensing issues, taxes, liability and so on. Are there restrictions on running a business out of your home? What restrictions does your current employer put on you?
Unfortunately, the effort required is not really commensurate with how much money you want to make -- there's going to be a lot more effort that just writing a program if you want anybody else to buy it.
First of all, you're ignoring subsidies and tax-breaks directly to corn-growers. Second, you're ignoring pro-corn tariffs -- why is everything sweetened with corn syrup? Because it's protected by a high tariff on sugar.
The fact that corn hasn't kept up with inflation does not mean that the corn industry doesn't benefit from federal farm policy. Of course corn is cheaper than it was in the 1970s -- the production of corn is thousands of times more efficient. But, farm policy works to keep corn prices low by giving money directly to corn producers. So, they don't have to charge for the full cost of production. As a result, corn is used as a substitute for other products. It's fed to cows, which don't normally eat corn. It's converted into Corn Syrup and used as a sweetener. And, now, it's being converted into ethanol.
According to Wikipedia, in 2004, the US government gave $2.4B in farm subsidies to "Feed Grains," mainly corn. (Wheat, for example, is a separate category.)
You can always conceal the size -- add extra information or break it into smaller messages. Most encryption algorithms change the size of the original message anyway. Also, you don't know what the eventual size is until the whole thing is transmitted. Is the ISP going to sit there and cache the whole thing until it reaches the end? What do you do with streaming media?
That's a rather cynical view. I suggest that piracy is also "allowed" because there's no reasonable way of stopping it.
Networks don't have any real way of keeping any single work off their networks. How on earth are they going to filter traffic for copyright works and then, on top of that, figure out which are authorized works and which aren't? How, for example, does it distinguish between (a) a copy of a song purchased off iTunes, (b) somebody streaming that song from their home computer to their laptop and (c) somebody sending the song to their friend? How does it distinguish between (a) sending a copy of a song and (b) sending a different work that makes a fair use of that song?
To get around any of these networks, all anybody has to do is encrypt their communications. That, and not using standard port numbers, will stymie any reasonable attempt at censorship. An ISP may still try "unreasonable" approaches like, say, only allowing access to approved websites. But, nobody would buy that product.
Exactly -- I was trying to point out the fallacy in Heller's view by turning it around. Similarly, if you're, say an ad agency and come across a very nice picture which you would normally pay a thousand dollars for, would you reasonably expect to use it for free?
Like I said, damages are based on a reasonable market price and do not depend on either party having paid or been paid before. But, if one party has bought or sold similar pictures in the open market, those earlier transactions are excellent evidence of that reasonable market price.
Except that in such cases, courts typically use an objective standard ("what would a reasonable license fee for this picture have been"), not a subjective standard ("what would this particular plaintiff have charged this particular defendant?") So, you find similar pictures and uses in a commercial setting and use that fee. Heck, if the company using the picture has licensed pictures before, it's even easier -- just see how much they normally pay.
Turn Heller's argument around: let's say that you're a commercial photographer who has licensed hundreds of pictures at $1,000 each. Now, I come along as a novice, grab your picture and put it on my website. Do I owe you $1,000? Under Heller's argument, I should be able to say "But, I've never licensed a picture before. I never would have paid $1,000. This is my first-ever suit for damages and happens to be in regard to the first time I ever would have paid for such a work in my life. I never would have paid anything for that, so your damages are $0."
Sure, without registration, you can only get actual damages & attorney's fees. But, if you haven't registered, you can still get actual damages. The fact that you're allowing some uses for free does not imply that you'd allow all uses. Stephen Colbert, for example, allowed viewers to create derivative works in his "green screen challenge," but would have been able to collect decent damages if his video had been used in a commercial, even if it was never registered.
Plus, if you register and they infringe again, then you can get statutory damages for infringments that occur after the registration.
Finally, you can also get an injunction ordering them to stop infringing.
So, the situation isn't quite as dire as Heller seems to believe. You're better off registering, but still have remedies if you don't.
A's use of the CC is a statement that there will be no monetary licensing costs.
There will be no monetary costs for using the work under the terms of the license. But, if you fall outside the license, things become murkier. After all, if you say "no commercial use," for example, it's because you want them to come back to you and pay for that commercial use. Same thing for the attribution clause.
(1) the fact that something claims to be licensed under creative commons doesn't mean that it actually is. I can't slap a CC license on your picture and re-use it. (2) some states have a "right to publicity," which means that if you're going to make a commercial use of my picture, you have to get a release from me. CC licenses do not come with such releases.
His third article is partly exercise in fiction -- he takes the view that a CC license is personal to each licensee, and that the licensor can just decide to stop licensing to new licensees. I have a tough time believing that any U.S. court would agree with this--once you've licensed under CC, you're probably "estopped" from denying the license. (In other words, since other people depend on your license, you can't pull the rug out.) The point about "keep track of where you got it from, and keep proof that it's under a CC license" is a good one, but you have to do that with any picture CC or not.
The part about 'since you haven't registered it, you won't be able to get statutory damages' is only partially true -- if there are serial infringements (like, say, in an ad campaign), you can register and then claim statutory damages for any infringement after registration. And, that's true whether you use a CC license or not. Plus, it's not at all clear that "actual damages" are zero -- it seems to me that actual damages would be what the infringer would have had to pay for a license. Since there's a good market in photo licenses, this isn't that hard to figure out.
(If you need legal advice, find a lawyer for advice specific to your situation.)
But if you have a piece of code which you wrote in its entirety, and which is only linked against the Linux kernel when on Linux, then it only has to be GPL'd when actually linked to the Linux kernel.
Yeah.... So, that's where things get murky.
What happens if you distribute a loadable kernel module that's all your own code? Well, then you have to ask whether it's a "Work based on the program," which the GPL says "means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law." So, then what's a derivative work under copyright law? Or, another way to ask it: if program A uses an interface exported by program B, is A a derivative work of B? Unfortunately, that is an open question under U.S. copyright law. But, I suspect that the answer is no. Otherwise Samba, for example, would be a derivative of Windows. And every plug-in would be a derivative of the main work.
A well-written license will be crystal clear about what rights the licensee has and what he has to do to hang onto those rights. Unfortunately, the GPL is not. And, I suspect that's what McAfee is worries about.
Well, that's not quite right. There is no blanket "personal use" exception in fair use. Other countries have something like that, but it doesn't exist in the US.
In the Betamax decision, for example, the Supreme Court differentiated between "time-shifting," which it ruled to be a fair use, and "library-building," which was not. Both are personal uses, but one is a fair use and one is not.
Also, look at Section 1008 of the Audio Home Recording Act, which immunizes certain home audio copying -- you can't immunize what's already non-infringing.
Now, there are not many court cases around such personal uses because, well, they're personal -- the copyright owner rarely finds out about them, and suing is typically not worth the effort. Instead, they sue manufacturers for contributory infringement, where the manufacturer makes something that others can use to infringe.
(First of all, she's not a partner; her husband is. Not really relevant, since his money is presumably hers.) If Jones Day were a small firm, your argument may hold some weight. But, it's among the largest in the US. The portion of his income that's going to come from fees associated with the merger is tiny. And, if the merger is typical, Jones Day has probably already finished most of its work.
Or (d) she has a job to do. When you're named to the FTC, it's because your expertise is valued. She should be involved in everything unless theres a strong enough reason not to.
There are two general duties involved in a Lawyer's duty to avoid conflicts.
The first is the duty of loyalty -- you generally can't be on "both sides" of a deal, because your duty to be loyal to one side will conflict with your duty to be loyal to the other. So, if one client wants to sue another, they both need to find another lawyer to do it.
The second is the duty of confidentiality -- you can't put yourself in a position where you could use confidential information about a former client. If, when you defended a (now) former client, you found out all sorts of salacious details, you can't litigate against them.
I don't think either of these are implicated here. She doesn't represent either DoubleClick or Google, nor has she. And, she doesn't have any knowledge about either, nor (apparently) does her husband.
Besides, you can't realistically have a rule against marriages between lawyers who work for firms on opposite sides of a transaction. Among large firms in any given city, there's an enormous number of cross-marriages. That rule would put them all out of business, and then how would two companies merge?
Have you even read RIAA v. Diamond? Its main finding is that the Diamond Rio was not a "digital audio recording device" under the AHRA. It mentions "space-shifting" once, and then only in the context of moving MP3 files from a computer drive to an MP3 player. It does not hold that "space-shifting" is a fair use. (Although, for some reason, many people seem to think that it does.)
The Diamond case could only "trump" a statute enacted by Congress if it addressed constitutional requirements, which it does not.
First of all, most judgments can be discharged in bankruptcy -- the main ones that can't are for fraud and securities violations. Check out 11 U.S.C. 523 for the list of things that cannot be. I'll agree that the 2005 changes to the bankruptcy code are creditor-friendly, mainly by denying chapter 7 relief to individuals with a steady income. But, chapter 13 work-outs allow for debts to be reduced to the point that a consumer can pay them.
As far as the RIAA & MPAA pushing for something in legislation, statutory damages were in the *1909* copyright act.
Copyright infringement can carry a criminal penalty under certain circumstances. And, in those cases, you do need beyond a reasonable doubt. But, that's not what happened here.
Her life isn't ruined. She can declare bankruptcy, get this debt knocked down to something she can pay and she can continue on with her life.
If it's important enough to ruin someone's life over then it's important enough for "beyond a reasonable doubt" to be in full effect. Why should we carve out copyright infringement -- there are all sorts of things where you can be sued for a lot of money with a lot less than "beyond a reasonable doubt." For example, if you leave your car in neutral and it runs over a child. Was it a mechanical problem or did you just forget to put it in park? That will be decided by a preponderance of the evidence standard (i.e. "more likely than not") when you're sued. Or, burn trash in your yard and accidentally catch your neighbor's house on fire. Or leave a dead tree in your yard until a storm comes and it crashes though your neighbor's roof.
Statutory damages are not based on actual damages. In most copyright infringement cases, damages are very hard to measure.
Let's turn this around and say that you actually had to prove damages to have any sort of recovery. In that framework, about the only thing the RIAA could do is get an injunction telling her to stop. But, that doesn't deter anybody from infringing. In fact, it's effectively a license to infringe until you're caught.
Argh. The report (possible sign-in required) DOES NOT say that the US is conduction cyber-espionage activities. (Note: the linked-to article in the parent points to the 2005 report) It does say that there are an "estimated 120 countries working on their cyberattack commands," which is quite different from actually being involved in espionage.
(Note that I'm not asserting that the US is not conducting electronic espionage. I would hope that we are. Heck, we did electronic espionage long before the internet; why should we stop now?)
So the fees you are required to pay for a public performance are defined by the statute? Well, for sound records, there is a "statutory license," where the fee that you pay to perform a work is set by the federal government (really, a copyright royalty panel).
You are, of course, correct that if you want to exercise one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights under section 106, you need a license from the copyright owner to do so. I was just pointing out that if you're not doing any of the section 106 things, there's no implied license.
As far as the DVD incident, it seems like typical MPAA over-reaching, since it sounds like there was not a "substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquantances."
Incorrect. You are buying very specific rights to the recording, not the actual recording itself. Can you buy a music CD and then use one of the songs on that CD for a television commercial without paying the artist additional fees? No. You will get sued because you are buying a LICENSE to play the music privately, not the actual music itself. No. You can't do that because doing so would be copyright infringement. Your ability to use your particular copy of a CD is defined by *statute,* not by contract. There are other things you can't do with your CD -- you can't make copies of it, you can't distribute it in copies, you can't broadcast it on the Internet. But, the reason you can't do these is because 17 U.S.C. 106 reserves these rights to the owner of the copyright, not because of any contract.
As far as the MPAA threatening to sue you for screening a DVD in your home, I'd need to know more about the situation to comment. In general, though, I don't think that act is an infringement. The copyright owner could complain if you were performing the DVD publicly, but that sure doesn't sound like a public performance to me. Of course, the MPAA is well-known for overreaching.
In what case has a CD burner been ruled to be a circumvention device?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. In a corporate environment, this sort of decision would get an IT person fired.
No, it does refer to how many different books it sells. At least that was the claim when Barnes & Noble sued them -- B&N was upset because although Amazon sold that many books, it didn't actually have them in stock, so it wasn't that large of a bookstore after all.
I don't claim that Amazon has all the books ever printed, just that if you pick a random book, you have a much better chance of finding it at Amazon.com than you do at your local book nook.
In any case, most book nooks do actually sell "mainstream/NYT bestseller books." In fact, sales of those books compose a large part of their sales. The book nook, after all, operates in the same market that amazon does -- when most people want mainstream books, it has to give them what they want or they go out of business. The idea of the local bookstore as purveyor of dusty hard-to-find and out-of-print books smelling of cigars and days-gone-by, lost treasures waiting for the diligent soul to rediscover them, is generally a romantic myth. There is, after all, a reason that such books are hard-to-find and out-of-print: not many people want them. And, it's hard to profitably run a brick & mortar business selling things that not many people want.
Beg pardon? Amazon is, after all, the world's biggest bookstore. You're much more likely to find something out-of-the-mainstream at Amazon than you are at your local bookstore. Heck, if that weren't the case, people who want out-of-the-mainstream books would continue to shop at the local bookstores, who would not be threatened by Amazon at all.
The only "culture" at risk here is the culture of inefficient small bookstores.
You can't copy the designs, but once the building has been constructed, you can do what you want to with the pictures.
In any case, they're claiming trademark and trade dress infringment. The easiest way around that is a prominent disclaimer saying that you have nothing to do with the Ford Motor Company. Trademark is all around consumer confusion -- once you negate the confusion, you're generally not infringing. (Ignore the doctrine of "tarnishing" for the moment, which doesn't seem to apply here.)
Well, except they're claiming trademark and trade dress infringement, not copyright. Trademark does depend, in part, on using the mark in commerce.
Also, one of the (copyright) fair use factors is whether your use is commercial, which would be impacted by whether you sell the copy.
Whichever route you choose. closed or open source, you need to evaluate your prospects. Are you capable of selling and maintaining it? Writing the code is necessary, but not enough to make money: do you have potential customers? How much work is going to be required to support it? Do you have enough time to do that? If you keep it closed-source, do you have the means to enforce your copyright? Have you written the documentation that goes along with it? Have you fully tested it?
Running a business is not a trivial undertaking -- you have to deal with licensing issues, taxes, liability and so on. Are there restrictions on running a business out of your home? What restrictions does your current employer put on you?
Unfortunately, the effort required is not really commensurate with how much money you want to make -- there's going to be a lot more effort that just writing a program if you want anybody else to buy it.
First of all, you're ignoring subsidies and tax-breaks directly to corn-growers. Second, you're ignoring pro-corn tariffs -- why is everything sweetened with corn syrup? Because it's protected by a high tariff on sugar.
The fact that corn hasn't kept up with inflation does not mean that the corn industry doesn't benefit from federal farm policy. Of course corn is cheaper than it was in the 1970s -- the production of corn is thousands of times more efficient. But, farm policy works to keep corn prices low by giving money directly to corn producers. So, they don't have to charge for the full cost of production. As a result, corn is used as a substitute for other products. It's fed to cows, which don't normally eat corn. It's converted into Corn Syrup and used as a sweetener. And, now, it's being converted into ethanol.
According to Wikipedia, in 2004, the US government gave $2.4B in farm subsidies to "Feed Grains," mainly corn. (Wheat, for example, is a separate category.)
You can always conceal the size -- add extra information or break it into smaller messages. Most encryption algorithms change the size of the original message anyway. Also, you don't know what the eventual size is until the whole thing is transmitted. Is the ISP going to sit there and cache the whole thing until it reaches the end? What do you do with streaming media?
That's a rather cynical view. I suggest that piracy is also "allowed" because there's no reasonable way of stopping it.
Networks don't have any real way of keeping any single work off their networks. How on earth are they going to filter traffic for copyright works and then, on top of that, figure out which are authorized works and which aren't? How, for example, does it distinguish between (a) a copy of a song purchased off iTunes, (b) somebody streaming that song from their home computer to their laptop and (c) somebody sending the song to their friend? How does it distinguish between (a) sending a copy of a song and (b) sending a different work that makes a fair use of that song?
To get around any of these networks, all anybody has to do is encrypt their communications. That, and not using standard port numbers, will stymie any reasonable attempt at censorship. An ISP may still try "unreasonable" approaches like, say, only allowing access to approved websites. But, nobody would buy that product.
Exactly -- I was trying to point out the fallacy in Heller's view by turning it around. Similarly, if you're, say an ad agency and come across a very nice picture which you would normally pay a thousand dollars for, would you reasonably expect to use it for free?
Like I said, damages are based on a reasonable market price and do not depend on either party having paid or been paid before. But, if one party has bought or sold similar pictures in the open market, those earlier transactions are excellent evidence of that reasonable market price.
Except that in such cases, courts typically use an objective standard ("what would a reasonable license fee for this picture have been"), not a subjective standard ("what would this particular plaintiff have charged this particular defendant?") So, you find similar pictures and uses in a commercial setting and use that fee. Heck, if the company using the picture has licensed pictures before, it's even easier -- just see how much they normally pay.
Turn Heller's argument around: let's say that you're a commercial photographer who has licensed hundreds of pictures at $1,000 each. Now, I come along as a novice, grab your picture and put it on my website. Do I owe you $1,000? Under Heller's argument, I should be able to say "But, I've never licensed a picture before. I never would have paid $1,000. This is my first-ever suit for damages and happens to be in regard to the first time I ever would have paid for such a work in my life. I never would have paid anything for that, so your damages are $0."
Sure, without registration, you can only get actual damages & attorney's fees. But, if you haven't registered, you can still get actual damages. The fact that you're allowing some uses for free does not imply that you'd allow all uses. Stephen Colbert, for example, allowed viewers to create derivative works in his "green screen challenge," but would have been able to collect decent damages if his video had been used in a commercial, even if it was never registered.
Plus, if you register and they infringe again, then you can get statutory damages for infringments that occur after the registration.
Finally, you can also get an injunction ordering them to stop infringing.
So, the situation isn't quite as dire as Heller seems to believe. You're better off registering, but still have remedies if you don't.
There will be no monetary costs for using the work under the terms of the license. But, if you fall outside the license, things become murkier. After all, if you say "no commercial use," for example, it's because you want them to come back to you and pay for that commercial use. Same thing for the attribution clause.
So, there are some risks with using CC licenses:
(1) the fact that something claims to be licensed under creative commons doesn't mean that it actually is. I can't slap a CC license on your picture and re-use it.
(2) some states have a "right to publicity," which means that if you're going to make a commercial use of my picture, you have to get a release from me. CC licenses do not come with such releases.
His third article is partly exercise in fiction -- he takes the view that a CC license is personal to each licensee, and that the licensor can just decide to stop licensing to new licensees. I have a tough time believing that any U.S. court would agree with this--once you've licensed under CC, you're probably "estopped" from denying the license. (In other words, since other people depend on your license, you can't pull the rug out.) The point about "keep track of where you got it from, and keep proof that it's under a CC license" is a good one, but you have to do that with any picture CC or not.
The part about 'since you haven't registered it, you won't be able to get statutory damages' is only partially true -- if there are serial infringements (like, say, in an ad campaign), you can register and then claim statutory damages for any infringement after registration. And, that's true whether you use a CC license or not. Plus, it's not at all clear that "actual damages" are zero -- it seems to me that actual damages would be what the infringer would have had to pay for a license. Since there's a good market in photo licenses, this isn't that hard to figure out.
(If you need legal advice, find a lawyer for advice specific to your situation.)
Yeah.... So, that's where things get murky.
What happens if you distribute a loadable kernel module that's all your own code? Well, then you have to ask whether it's a "Work based on the program," which the GPL says "means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law." So, then what's a derivative work under copyright law? Or, another way to ask it: if program A uses an interface exported by program B, is A a derivative work of B? Unfortunately, that is an open question under U.S. copyright law. But, I suspect that the answer is no. Otherwise Samba, for example, would be a derivative of Windows. And every plug-in would be a derivative of the main work.
A well-written license will be crystal clear about what rights the licensee has and what he has to do to hang onto those rights. Unfortunately, the GPL is not. And, I suspect that's what McAfee is worries about.
Well, that's not quite right. There is no blanket "personal use" exception in fair use. Other countries have something like that, but it doesn't exist in the US.
In the Betamax decision, for example, the Supreme Court differentiated between "time-shifting," which it ruled to be a fair use, and "library-building," which was not. Both are personal uses, but one is a fair use and one is not.
Also, look at Section 1008 of the Audio Home Recording Act, which immunizes certain home audio copying -- you can't immunize what's already non-infringing.
Now, there are not many court cases around such personal uses because, well, they're personal -- the copyright owner rarely finds out about them, and suing is typically not worth the effort. Instead, they sue manufacturers for contributory infringement, where the manufacturer makes something that others can use to infringe.
(First of all, she's not a partner; her husband is. Not really relevant, since his money is presumably hers.) If Jones Day were a small firm, your argument may hold some weight. But, it's among the largest in the US. The portion of his income that's going to come from fees associated with the merger is tiny. And, if the merger is typical, Jones Day has probably already finished most of its work.
Or (d) she has a job to do. When you're named to the FTC, it's because your expertise is valued. She should be involved in everything unless theres a strong enough reason not to.
There are two general duties involved in a Lawyer's duty to avoid conflicts.
The first is the duty of loyalty -- you generally can't be on "both sides" of a deal, because your duty to be loyal to one side will conflict with your duty to be loyal to the other. So, if one client wants to sue another, they both need to find another lawyer to do it.
The second is the duty of confidentiality -- you can't put yourself in a position where you could use confidential information about a former client. If, when you defended a (now) former client, you found out all sorts of salacious details, you can't litigate against them.
I don't think either of these are implicated here. She doesn't represent either DoubleClick or Google, nor has she. And, she doesn't have any knowledge about either, nor (apparently) does her husband.
Besides, you can't realistically have a rule against marriages between lawyers who work for firms on opposite sides of a transaction. Among large firms in any given city, there's an enormous number of cross-marriages. That rule would put them all out of business, and then how would two companies merge?
Have you even read RIAA v. Diamond? Its main finding is that the Diamond Rio was not a "digital audio recording device" under the AHRA. It mentions "space-shifting" once, and then only in the context of moving MP3 files from a computer drive to an MP3 player. It does not hold that "space-shifting" is a fair use. (Although, for some reason, many people seem to think that it does.)
The Diamond case could only "trump" a statute enacted by Congress if it addressed constitutional requirements, which it does not.
First of all, most judgments can be discharged in bankruptcy -- the main ones that can't are for fraud and securities violations. Check out 11 U.S.C. 523 for the list of things that cannot be. I'll agree that the 2005 changes to the bankruptcy code are creditor-friendly, mainly by denying chapter 7 relief to individuals with a steady income. But, chapter 13 work-outs allow for debts to be reduced to the point that a consumer can pay them.
As far as the RIAA & MPAA pushing for something in legislation, statutory damages were in the *1909* copyright act.
Copyright infringement can carry a criminal penalty under certain circumstances. And, in those cases, you do need beyond a reasonable doubt. But, that's not what happened here.
Statutory damages are not based on actual damages. In most copyright infringement cases, damages are very hard to measure.
Let's turn this around and say that you actually had to prove damages to have any sort of recovery. In that framework, about the only thing the RIAA could do is get an injunction telling her to stop. But, that doesn't deter anybody from infringing. In fact, it's effectively a license to infringe until you're caught.
Argh. The report (possible sign-in required) DOES NOT say that the US is conduction cyber-espionage activities. (Note: the linked-to article in the parent points to the 2005 report) It does say that there are an "estimated 120 countries working on their cyberattack commands," which is quite different from actually being involved in espionage.
(Note that I'm not asserting that the US is not conducting electronic espionage. I would hope that we are. Heck, we did electronic espionage long before the internet; why should we stop now?)
You are, of course, correct that if you want to exercise one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights under section 106, you need a license from the copyright owner to do so. I was just pointing out that if you're not doing any of the section 106 things, there's no implied license.
As far as the DVD incident, it seems like typical MPAA over-reaching, since it sounds like there was not a "substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquantances."
As far as the MPAA threatening to sue you for screening a DVD in your home, I'd need to know more about the situation to comment. In general, though, I don't think that act is an infringement. The copyright owner could complain if you were performing the DVD publicly, but that sure doesn't sound like a public performance to me. Of course, the MPAA is well-known for overreaching.
In what case has a CD burner been ruled to be a circumvention device?