The problem is asymmetric costs. Because it's an INTERnet, the traffic that I put on may pass over several networks before it gets to you. I only pay my provider, but may be impacting your provider.
This sort of thing is supposed to be taken care of by peering agreements, based on the idea "If you carry my traffic, I'll carry yours." This only makes sense, though, when the two numbers are roughly equal -- ie I'm sending about as much to your network as you are to mine.
With residential ISPs, this breaks down -- most consumers are major data sinks and not data sources. Heck, how many of us have some sort of asymmetric bandwoth -- 6 MBPS down and 256 kbps up.
I don't think anybody disagrees that "broad"band ISPS need to increase bandwidth -- there are all sorts of applications which are just too bandwidth-intensive for (most of) the current technologies. (Think IPTV). The problem is that they're going to want to recover their costs somehow, and there are two sets of people out there: their subscribers and the service providers. The ISPs have made the calculation that they may not be able to change their customers an additional $75 every month. But, if they can avoid net neutrality, they may be able to get that from places like Google's video service.
The problem is that Network Neutrality has been framed as "Yahoo pays your ISP to slow down google's service." No service provider in his right mind is going to do that. (Well, there may be one. But everybody else will learn their lesson from that one.) It's really about "Yahoo paid extra to have access to your ISP's new bandwidth limit and Google didn't. So, Yahoo's video service looks better than Google's."
Well, the Internet itself doesn't generally "go down" -- it was designed to be able to recover. However... I've certainly seen what he's talking about on a more micro basis: occasionally, when I do a large download (or several simultaneous downloads), the voice quality on my VoIP connection will drop. My VoIP link also has more problems in the evening when the entire neighborhood is on. Some traffic is simply more important than other traffic and ought to be prioritized that way. That's not a particularly provocative statement -- the IP protocol itself has had mechanisms for doing so for decades. The concern here isn't with prioritization, it's with power -- the power of ISPs to decide who their customers can get data from, and at what speeds.
In the end, it all comes down to money -- the best way to figure out who gets priority is to see who values it more. And, that means that people who use networks are going to pay money to those who run them.
The cost of pirated software is typically free, or at least highly discounted. There are naturally far more people willing to get it for free than would be willing to pay for it. So, every pirated use is NOT a lost sale. That's probably especially true in very poor countries. So, the amazingly high rate of piracy in 3rd world countries really doesn't present that big of an issue for the software industry. The 20+% in the U.S., though, should be causing them a lot of concern.
No it's not. It's about video. The last mile, as it sits right now, is perfectly well suited for podcasters and bloggers. (at least downstream). The problem is that the last mile is not perfectly suited for video. At least not for high-quality video. Suppose that, say, CNN were to stream its video stream in full quality on the Internet -- 99% of us would have a lousy experience with it because of our provider's network. You're still much better off paying $45/month and getting it (and a lot of other channels) from your cable company.
But, that's the problem -- you're paying $45/month for video and $45/month for your highspeed internet. If you start watching TV over your internet link, you will drop the video service and only go with data. And, your cable company will stop making as much money. So, why would they make it easy for you to do that unless they get a cut of the video stream?
The only current answer to that is "if they don't, I'll switch to DSL from the phone company." Fat chance -- the phone companies want to sell video as well.
Well, the decision doesn't specifically say that, but it's pretty much implied. Here's the structure of the argument:
1. Sony is liable as a contributory copyright infringer if its products are incapable of substantial non-infringing uses.
2. There are two common uses: time-shifting and library-building.
3. Time shifting is a fair use and is thus non-infringing.
4. Therefore, Sony is not liable.
The implication is that library-building is not a fair use. The court didn't specifically find that, but it seems pretty obvious under the copyright statute. 17 U.S.C. 106 reserves the right to reproduce works to the the copyright owner. So, unless there's a defense, it's infringing. Time-shifting is a fair use, and fair use a defense to infringement. Copying for the purpose of building a library has nowhere been found to be a fair use.
Now, in reality, copyright owners are not going to go around suing consumers for building libraries of over-the-air shows. First, they wouldn't know who to sue, and second it would be a dumb business decision. But, when somebody like a cable TV company comes along and tries to build a huge library, copyright holders are going to pay attention.
Sure. The betamax case is here. Look for page 423 for a description of the two types of usage, time-shifting and library-building. Also look at the court's discussion of timeshifting as fair use, starting at around 447.
In any case, Betamax was concerned with copying, which is one of the 6 copyrights (see 17 U.S.C. 106). Here, the cable companies are also distributing copies to the public. That goes well beyond what Betamax found to be fair use.
There is a huge differene here. Under the Supreme Court's Betamax decision, you, as a consumer, have a fair use right to "Timeshift" the shows you receive. So, you are allowed to put them on your DVR or your VCR in order to watch them later. You are not allowed, however, to create a library so you can watch something many times or so you can give recordings to your friends.
Here, the cable company is NOT engaging in timeshifting -- it's just copying the signal and distributing it to people as they want it, and they're doing it for a profit.
Looking at the 4 fair use factors embodied in 17 USC 107...
(1) This is a commercial use (2) of generally creative works (goes to the core of copyright protection) (3) They're copying the whole thing and (4) They are potentially harming the market for the network to sell DVD copies of the shows, for itunes versions (as in Lost), or the networks to stream from their own websites (as ABC does).
Look at it like this: Your cable company has a copy of Lost, and (for a price) will send it to you. ABC also has a copy of Lost and (for a price) will send it to you. ABC holds the copyright. The Cable company is clearly infringing.
First, Plaintiff's firms are very different from the general practice firms that you're thinking about. They are often the bottom-dwellers of the legal profession.
Second, there is always a race to the courthouse with class-action suits: the firm that gets listed as lead counsel stands to get a big share of any settlement. Whereas most of the class ends up getting things like coupons, the counsel gets a big chunk of change. Being the first to file, especially if they have a good representative plaintiff, will be considered favorably by the court when picking a lead counsel.
I don't know much about either firm, but in this environment, it wouldn't surprise me to find a few i's and t's that weren't crossed. I suspect that they don't often get a lead plaintiff who says "Not interested."
The article doesn't really make it clear who gets the extra cash -- in fact, it mentions that artists should get more. Sure, Ticketmaster is running the auction, but that doesn't mean that they keep all the profits.
It'll be interesting to see how this runs up against anti-scalping laws in the various states. In NC, for example, it is illegal to sell a ticket for more than $3 over face value. ($3 being the ticketmaster surcharge.)
So, first the plaintiffs would need to prove that their information was shared. However, any records related to this are likely to be highly classified. But, you can't just go subpoenaing classified records just because you read some story in a newspaper and decide to sue. Without records of the sharing, there is no case.
This is really just a few plaintiff's law firms hoping that their suits have some nuisance value to the Telcos who will pay some money to make them go away. If the law firms get some publicity as a result, all the better.
Geez... that's a horribly cynical view. Lawyers have a professional concern in what the law is and what it should be. They also have special training that enables them to recognize non-obvious connections between current law and proposed law. They don't have a monopoly on such things, but it's dumb to discount something just because a lawyer wrote it.
Here, though, the author is wrong -- he asserts that the main difference between KFC favoring Pepsi and I-95 favoring GM cars is that you can choose not to go to KFC and can get Coke from McDonalds.
That's a bunch of baloney, though -- the main difference is that tax money paid for I-95, not for KFC. Applying his analogy to iTunes, which does not really have a lot of decent competition, would mean that Apple should be forced to let people use non iPod players.
There is a big difference between what most of these ad sites do and your newegg example. Trademark is all about preventing consumers from being confused. Most typo-squatting sites are clearly such -- no reasonable consumer could mistake them for the site that they're trying to reach.
If, on the other hand, somebody were to go to neweg.com and get another vendor of computer hardware, that might actually cause confusion and there would be an action for trademark infringement.
There was a famous case in the U.S., involving a store, "Victor's Little Secret" being sued by victoria's secret. The court found that there wasn't any evidence of confusion and thus no trademark infringement. Website domain names are generally treated the same way, at least by trademark law.
The contents of the National Security Letters are still classified. The release of the statistics about the NSLs is required by law -- this was an intentional release.
The NSLs operate in the area between criminal investigations and intelligence gathering and have been going on for a long time, well before the Patriot Act. And, there are a lot of applications where these are perfectly reasonable. I don't think most US Citizens would mind, for example, if we bugged the private residence of the Iranian U.N. ambassador.
Uhh... First of all, "Prevailing wage" is a red herring. If it's a factory job and everybody's making the same thing, prevailing wage is easy to calculate. If, however, it's a high-tech company and everybody is on a different payscale, it's nearly impossible.
In any case, the problem is with supply-and-demand: the availability of the H1-B visa drives the prevailing wage down, or at least keeps it from rising as it would if there were not an alternative source of workers.
As to your (b) point, H1-B visas allow employers to decide "Well, I could retrain this American, or I could get an H1-B visaholder." If there were fewer H1-B visas, then there would be more Americans retrained.
I think that the entire H1-B visa system needs to be modified: rather than having the first-come, first-served model where all the H1-B visas run out on the first day, the right to have a visa should be auctioned off. Those employers who actually need those with skills that are difficult to acquire domestically will be able to hire into those positions. But, those employers who are just getting an H1-B visaholder because they don't want the additional cost of retraining an American won't.
The other advantage of such a system is that it will give some feedback about whether there are actually too few or too many H1-B visas issued annually: If the prices fetched at auction are really high, then we could release more visas into the pool on the next offer. If the prices are low, that indicates that people are hiring H1-Bs in lieu of Americans, and we could reduce the number of visas.
There are a number of problems, several of which have already been mentioned:
(1) "Moral Rights" cannot generally be assigned -- the rights vest in only the author, not his/her assignees. (2) Moral Rights to not extend to imitation -- they can prevent modification of a work, but do not prevent people from imitating the work. If you think about it, this is a very logical limitation -- do you want, e.g., Tom Clancy to be able to tell other authors not to copy his style?
It seems to me that Google's attorneys probably realized that there was no way that they were infringing, but that the possibility of a legal fight wasn't worth the benefit of keeping a banner up -- there are only so many copyright infringement suits that Google wants to be in at the same time.
"Lawyering," as you put it, is not as much of a moneymaker as some people tend to think. True, many large law firms start in the $140K range, but they hire almost exclusively out of the top 15 or so law schools. Grab a look at the USNews & World report median starting salaries for the law schools -- the top-tier is flat, then they drop precipitously. There are scads of attorneys who start at $35,000 as public defenders or in some small law firm somewhere.
You are really misreading the statute and the order. The statute, PL 109-21, bans unsolicited faxes unless (1) there is an established business relationship, (2) the fax number was obtained legitimately (including from the recipient's web site) AND (3) there's an opt-out notice on it. Posting the fax number on your web site only becomes consent if you have an established business relationship. It is not general consent to receive junk faxes from anybody.
People are making the argument that "going to their Internet site" is a prior business relationship and that (1) and (2) short circuit as a result. That's an absurd reading from botth a factual standard (who considers a business relationship to exist just because somebody visits your website?) and from a statutory construction standard. Judges assume that when Congress lists two conjuctive requirements, it actually wants them both to be met.
My 4th point was to demonstrate that there are legitimate reasons for this sort of thing which have nothing to do with hyping stocks, identity theft or bum vacation deals, not to assert that doing these things under the prior statute was acceptible. (I pulled the information out of the order itself.)
So, sue 'em. The law gives you a private right of action -- I think it's $500 per junk fax and (if I recall correctly), you get your attorney's fees as well.
If you want the FCC to get involved, at minimum, you should file a complaint with them -- how are they even going to know about this crap?
a year or two ago, we were getting a bunch of junk faxes to our fax machine. I called up one of the companies and asked for their business address. When they asked why, I said that it was because I needed to know where to serve them with process and then they asked for my phone number and I haven't gotten a single junk fax since.
Isn't there ANY CHECKING AT ALL for the veracity of top-level posts? The FCC's order is so far apart from what the original poster claimed.
First of all, you CANNOT visit a website and legitimately claim an existing business relationship -- the act contains a definition of a relationship, and it does NOT include visiting a web site.
Secondly, the FCC was just implementing a law passed by CONGRESS. This is something that they were ordered to do, not something that they're doing sua sponte.
Third, I see NOTHING in here about junk-fax trapping. I do see that if you have an established business relationship and your customer posts their fax number on their website, you can use that to send them a fax. If they haven't given you their number (either personally or via the web), you cannot junk-fax them even with an established business relationship.
Fourth, there are industries which commonly and legitimately use faxes as a means of accepting advertising. For example, realtors who regularly fax listings to home purchasers in the market or food-service companies who fax their restaraunt customers with the lastest specials and price sheets.
The rules also require that junk faxes have clear opt-out provisions on the cover page and they have to take the recipient out within 30 days.
(1) Factually, the computers are not being made in different placed than they were before or by different people. It should only be slightly easier for the Chinese to do this now that it's Lenovo and not "IBM PC Division."
(2) Lets say that the Chinese were caught bugging computers -- it would be horrible public relations not only for Lenovo, which would lose some gigantic portion of its market share, but for the entire computer industry that manufactures overseas.
(3) Considering the number of U.S. Citizens employed by Lenovo, what are the chances that none of them would clue in?
This is really just a play by the anti-globalization people who scored a success in the Dubai PortsWorld deal and now see national security as an effective tool in their fight.
Pfft. "Many" believe in UFOs. "Many" people are in jail. "Many" believe what they see on TV. "Many" called the Coast Guard to tell them about this ship called the Minnow that was wrecked somewhere in the South Pacific.
Most people can come up with an alternative who they would prefer to their Congressman, Senator or President. But, most people would not agree with that alternative. And, even fewer people would agree once they found out about the alternative and his/her beliefs.
There are very, very few politicians who are very well regarded by a majority of the population. In an election between a candidate who is extremely well-liked by a minority and one who is only marginally well-liked by a majority, the latter candidate will win.
It's not that I can't write clearly, it's just that writing clearly means that I have to write slowly and pay attention to what I'm writing. If I'm in class and taking notes, I'm writing quickly and trying to pay attention to what's going on in class. I can usually decrypt what I've written, but doing so is a nuisance.
If anybody actually reads the story detailing what Martin said, it isn't ANYTHING LIKE what this blog comment says. All he said was that if an ISP wants to charge its SUBSCRIBERS differently for different types of service, they should be allowed to. But, that's exactly what ISPs do now! I can pay my cable company an extra $20/month and get a higher bandwidth connection. The big argument is around whether ISPs should be able to treat content differently based on payments from the content providers, NOT whether they can treat subscribers differently based on subscriber payments.
Also, recognize that although Martin is the Chairman of the FCC, he does not have unilateral power to decide how the FCC will regulate the Internet -- there are 4 other commissioners and they each have a vote.
The central question that Martin was trying to address (and, from the sounds of it, did a lousy job) was whether the FCC actually had the authority to enforce network neutrality. He asserted that the FCC does, citing the Madison River case (where an ISP blocked Vonage). However, that case came before the FCC reclassified DSL & Cable Modem services as "Information Services," which are subject to very little regulation.
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The problem is asymmetric costs. Because it's an INTERnet, the traffic that I put on may pass over several networks before it gets to you. I only pay my provider, but may be impacting your provider.
This sort of thing is supposed to be taken care of by peering agreements, based on the idea "If you carry my traffic, I'll carry yours." This only makes sense, though, when the two numbers are roughly equal -- ie I'm sending about as much to your network as you are to mine.
With residential ISPs, this breaks down -- most consumers are major data sinks and not data sources. Heck, how many of us have some sort of asymmetric bandwoth -- 6 MBPS down and 256 kbps up.
I don't think anybody disagrees that "broad"band ISPS need to increase bandwidth -- there are all sorts of applications which are just too bandwidth-intensive for (most of) the current technologies. (Think IPTV). The problem is that they're going to want to recover their costs somehow, and there are two sets of people out there: their subscribers and the service providers. The ISPs have made the calculation that they may not be able to change their customers an additional $75 every month. But, if they can avoid net neutrality, they may be able to get that from places like Google's video service.
The problem is that Network Neutrality has been framed as "Yahoo pays your ISP to slow down google's service." No service provider in his right mind is going to do that. (Well, there may be one. But everybody else will learn their lesson from that one.) It's really about "Yahoo paid extra to have access to your ISP's new bandwidth limit and Google didn't. So, Yahoo's video service looks better than Google's."
Well, the Internet itself doesn't generally "go down" -- it was designed to be able to recover. However... I've certainly seen what he's talking about on a more micro basis: occasionally, when I do a large download (or several simultaneous downloads), the voice quality on my VoIP connection will drop. My VoIP link also has more problems in the evening when the entire neighborhood is on. Some traffic is simply more important than other traffic and ought to be prioritized that way. That's not a particularly provocative statement -- the IP protocol itself has had mechanisms for doing so for decades. The concern here isn't with prioritization, it's with power -- the power of ISPs to decide who their customers can get data from, and at what speeds.
In the end, it all comes down to money -- the best way to figure out who gets priority is to see who values it more. And, that means that people who use networks are going to pay money to those who run them.
The cost of pirated software is typically free, or at least highly discounted. There are naturally far more people willing to get it for free than would be willing to pay for it. So, every pirated use is NOT a lost sale. That's probably especially true in very poor countries. So, the amazingly high rate of piracy in 3rd world countries really doesn't present that big of an issue for the software industry. The 20+% in the U.S., though, should be causing them a lot of concern.
No it's not. It's about video. The last mile, as it sits right now, is perfectly well suited for podcasters and bloggers. (at least downstream). The problem is that the last mile is not perfectly suited for video. At least not for high-quality video. Suppose that, say, CNN were to stream its video stream in full quality on the Internet -- 99% of us would have a lousy experience with it because of our provider's network. You're still much better off paying $45/month and getting it (and a lot of other channels) from your cable company.
But, that's the problem -- you're paying $45/month for video and $45/month for your highspeed internet. If you start watching TV over your internet link, you will drop the video service and only go with data. And, your cable company will stop making as much money. So, why would they make it easy for you to do that unless they get a cut of the video stream?
The only current answer to that is "if they don't, I'll switch to DSL from the phone company." Fat chance -- the phone companies want to sell video as well.
Well, the decision doesn't specifically say that, but it's pretty much implied. Here's the structure of the argument:
1. Sony is liable as a contributory copyright infringer if its products are incapable of substantial non-infringing uses.
2. There are two common uses: time-shifting and library-building.
3. Time shifting is a fair use and is thus non-infringing.
4. Therefore, Sony is not liable.
The implication is that library-building is not a fair use. The court didn't specifically find that, but it seems pretty obvious under the copyright statute. 17 U.S.C. 106 reserves the right to reproduce works to the the copyright owner. So, unless there's a defense, it's infringing. Time-shifting is a fair use, and fair use a defense to infringement. Copying for the purpose of building a library has nowhere been found to be a fair use.
Now, in reality, copyright owners are not going to go around suing consumers for building libraries of over-the-air shows. First, they wouldn't know who to sue, and second it would be a dumb business decision. But, when somebody like a cable TV company comes along and tries to build a huge library, copyright holders are going to pay attention.
Look at the dissenting opinion....
Sure. The betamax case is here. Look for page 423 for a description of the two types of usage, time-shifting and library-building. Also look at the court's discussion of timeshifting as fair use, starting at around 447.
In any case, Betamax was concerned with copying, which is one of the 6 copyrights (see 17 U.S.C. 106). Here, the cable companies are also distributing copies to the public. That goes well beyond what Betamax found to be fair use.
There is a huge differene here. Under the Supreme Court's Betamax decision, you, as a consumer, have a fair use right to "Timeshift" the shows you receive. So, you are allowed to put them on your DVR or your VCR in order to watch them later. You are not allowed, however, to create a library so you can watch something many times or so you can give recordings to your friends.
Here, the cable company is NOT engaging in timeshifting -- it's just copying the signal and distributing it to people as they want it, and they're doing it for a profit.
Looking at the 4 fair use factors embodied in 17 USC 107...
(1) This is a commercial use
(2) of generally creative works (goes to the core of copyright protection)
(3) They're copying the whole thing and
(4) They are potentially harming the market for the network to sell DVD copies of the shows, for itunes versions (as in Lost), or the networks to stream from their own websites (as ABC does).
Look at it like this: Your cable company has a copy of Lost, and (for a price) will send it to you. ABC also has a copy of Lost and (for a price) will send it to you. ABC holds the copyright. The Cable company is clearly infringing.
It's not fair use.
First, Plaintiff's firms are very different from the general practice firms that you're thinking about. They are often the bottom-dwellers of the legal profession.
Second, there is always a race to the courthouse with class-action suits: the firm that gets listed as lead counsel stands to get a big share of any settlement. Whereas most of the class ends up getting things like coupons, the counsel gets a big chunk of change. Being the first to file, especially if they have a good representative plaintiff, will be considered favorably by the court when picking a lead counsel.
I don't know much about either firm, but in this environment, it wouldn't surprise me to find a few i's and t's that weren't crossed. I suspect that they don't often get a lead plaintiff who says "Not interested."
The article doesn't really make it clear who gets the extra cash -- in fact, it mentions that artists should get more. Sure, Ticketmaster is running the auction, but that doesn't mean that they keep all the profits.
It'll be interesting to see how this runs up against anti-scalping laws in the various states. In NC, for example, it is illegal to sell a ticket for more than $3 over face value. ($3 being the ticketmaster surcharge.)
So, first the plaintiffs would need to prove that their information was shared. However, any records related to this are likely to be highly classified. But, you can't just go subpoenaing classified records just because you read some story in a newspaper and decide to sue. Without records of the sharing, there is no case.
This is really just a few plaintiff's law firms hoping that their suits have some nuisance value to the Telcos who will pay some money to make them go away. If the law firms get some publicity as a result, all the better.
Geez... that's a horribly cynical view. Lawyers have a professional concern in what the law is and what it should be. They also have special training that enables them to recognize non-obvious connections between current law and proposed law. They don't have a monopoly on such things, but it's dumb to discount something just because a lawyer wrote it.
Here, though, the author is wrong -- he asserts that the main difference between KFC favoring Pepsi and I-95 favoring GM cars is that you can choose not to go to KFC and can get Coke from McDonalds.
That's a bunch of baloney, though -- the main difference is that tax money paid for I-95, not for KFC. Applying his analogy to iTunes, which does not really have a lot of decent competition, would mean that Apple should be forced to let people use non iPod players.
There is a big difference between what most of these ad sites do and your newegg example. Trademark is all about preventing consumers from being confused. Most typo-squatting sites are clearly such -- no reasonable consumer could mistake them for the site that they're trying to reach.
If, on the other hand, somebody were to go to neweg.com and get another vendor of computer hardware, that might actually cause confusion and there would be an action for trademark infringement.
There was a famous case in the U.S., involving a store, "Victor's Little Secret" being sued by victoria's secret. The court found that there wasn't any evidence of confusion and thus no trademark infringement. Website domain names are generally treated the same way, at least by trademark law.
The contents of the National Security Letters are still classified. The release of the statistics about the NSLs is required by law -- this was an intentional release.
The NSLs operate in the area between criminal investigations and intelligence gathering and have been going on for a long time, well before the Patriot Act. And, there are a lot of applications where these are perfectly reasonable. I don't think most US Citizens would mind, for example, if we bugged the private residence of the Iranian U.N. ambassador.
Uhh... First of all, "Prevailing wage" is a red herring. If it's a factory job and everybody's making the same thing, prevailing wage is easy to calculate. If, however, it's a high-tech company and everybody is on a different payscale, it's nearly impossible.
In any case, the problem is with supply-and-demand: the availability of the H1-B visa drives the prevailing wage down, or at least keeps it from rising as it would if there were not an alternative source of workers.
As to your (b) point, H1-B visas allow employers to decide "Well, I could retrain this American, or I could get an H1-B visaholder." If there were fewer H1-B visas, then there would be more Americans retrained.
I think that the entire H1-B visa system needs to be modified: rather than having the first-come, first-served model where all the H1-B visas run out on the first day, the right to have a visa should be auctioned off. Those employers who actually need those with skills that are difficult to acquire domestically will be able to hire into those positions. But, those employers who are just getting an H1-B visaholder because they don't want the additional cost of retraining an American won't.
The other advantage of such a system is that it will give some feedback about whether there are actually too few or too many H1-B visas issued annually: If the prices fetched at auction are really high, then we could release more visas into the pool on the next offer. If the prices are low, that indicates that people are hiring H1-Bs in lieu of Americans, and we could reduce the number of visas.
There are a number of problems, several of which have already been mentioned:
(1) "Moral Rights" cannot generally be assigned -- the rights vest in only the author, not his/her assignees.
(2) Moral Rights to not extend to imitation -- they can prevent modification of a work, but do not prevent people from imitating the work. If you think about it, this is a very logical limitation -- do you want, e.g., Tom Clancy to be able to tell other authors not to copy his style?
It seems to me that Google's attorneys probably realized that there was no way that they were infringing, but that the possibility of a legal fight wasn't worth the benefit of keeping a banner up -- there are only so many copyright infringement suits that Google wants to be in at the same time.
This is an easy one: square envelopes cost more.
"Lawyering," as you put it, is not as much of a moneymaker as some people tend to think. True, many large law firms start in the $140K range, but they hire almost exclusively out of the top 15 or so law schools. Grab a look at the USNews & World report median starting salaries for the law schools -- the top-tier is flat, then they drop precipitously. There are scads of attorneys who start at $35,000 as public defenders or in some small law firm somewhere.
You are really misreading the statute and the order. The statute, PL 109-21, bans unsolicited faxes unless (1) there is an established business relationship, (2) the fax number was obtained legitimately (including from the recipient's web site) AND (3) there's an opt-out notice on it. Posting the fax number on your web site only becomes consent if you have an established business relationship. It is not general consent to receive junk faxes from anybody.
People are making the argument that "going to their Internet site" is a prior business relationship and that (1) and (2) short circuit as a result. That's an absurd reading from botth a factual standard (who considers a business relationship to exist just because somebody visits your website?) and from a statutory construction standard. Judges assume that when Congress lists two conjuctive requirements, it actually wants them both to be met.
My 4th point was to demonstrate that there are legitimate reasons for this sort of thing which have nothing to do with hyping stocks, identity theft or bum vacation deals, not to assert that doing these things under the prior statute was acceptible. (I pulled the information out of the order itself.)
So, sue 'em. The law gives you a private right of action -- I think it's $500 per junk fax and (if I recall correctly), you get your attorney's fees as well.
If you want the FCC to get involved, at minimum, you should file a complaint with them -- how are they even going to know about this crap?
a year or two ago, we were getting a bunch of junk faxes to our fax machine. I called up one of the companies and asked for their business address. When they asked why, I said that it was because I needed to know where to serve them with process and then they asked for my phone number and I haven't gotten a single junk fax since.
Isn't there ANY CHECKING AT ALL for the veracity of top-level posts? The FCC's order is so far apart from what the original poster claimed.
First of all, you CANNOT visit a website and legitimately claim an existing business relationship -- the act contains a definition of a relationship, and it does NOT include visiting a web site.
Secondly, the FCC was just implementing a law passed by CONGRESS. This is something that they were ordered to do, not something that they're doing sua sponte.
Third, I see NOTHING in here about junk-fax trapping. I do see that if you have an established business relationship and your customer posts their fax number on their website, you can use that to send them a fax. If they haven't given you their number (either personally or via the web), you cannot junk-fax them even with an established business relationship.
Fourth, there are industries which commonly and legitimately use faxes as a means of accepting advertising. For example, realtors who regularly fax listings to home purchasers in the market or food-service companies who fax their restaraunt customers with the lastest specials and price sheets.
The rules also require that junk faxes have clear opt-out provisions on the cover page and they have to take the recipient out within 30 days.
This is a bad policy for a number of reasons:
(1) Factually, the computers are not being made in different placed than they were before or by different people. It should only be slightly easier for the Chinese to do this now that it's Lenovo and not "IBM PC Division."
(2) Lets say that the Chinese were caught bugging computers -- it would be horrible public relations not only for Lenovo, which would lose some gigantic portion of its market share, but for the entire computer industry that manufactures overseas.
(3) Considering the number of U.S. Citizens employed by Lenovo, what are the chances that none of them would clue in?
This is really just a play by the anti-globalization people who scored a success in the Dubai PortsWorld deal and now see national security as an effective tool in their fight.
Pfft. "Many" believe in UFOs. "Many" people are in jail. "Many" believe what they see on TV. "Many" called the Coast Guard to tell them about this ship called the Minnow that was wrecked somewhere in the South Pacific.
Most people can come up with an alternative who they would prefer to their Congressman, Senator or President. But, most people would not agree with that alternative. And, even fewer people would agree once they found out about the alternative and his/her beliefs.
There are very, very few politicians who are very well regarded by a majority of the population. In an election between a candidate who is extremely well-liked by a minority and one who is only marginally well-liked by a majority, the latter candidate will win.
Yeah. Most people assume it's a joke.
It's not that I can't write clearly, it's just that writing clearly means that I have to write slowly and pay attention to what I'm writing. If I'm in class and taking notes, I'm writing quickly and trying to pay attention to what's going on in class. I can usually decrypt what I've written, but doing so is a nuisance.
If anybody actually reads the story detailing what Martin said, it isn't ANYTHING LIKE what this blog comment says. All he said was that if an ISP wants to charge its SUBSCRIBERS differently for different types of service, they should be allowed to. But, that's exactly what ISPs do now! I can pay my cable company an extra $20/month and get a higher bandwidth connection. The big argument is around whether ISPs should be able to treat content differently based on payments from the content providers, NOT whether they can treat subscribers differently based on subscriber payments.
Also, recognize that although Martin is the Chairman of the FCC, he does not have unilateral power to decide how the FCC will regulate the Internet -- there are 4 other commissioners and they each have a vote.
The central question that Martin was trying to address (and, from the sounds of it, did a lousy job) was whether the FCC actually had the authority to enforce network neutrality. He asserted that the FCC does, citing the Madison River case (where an ISP blocked Vonage). However, that case came before the FCC reclassified DSL & Cable Modem services as "Information Services," which are subject to very little regulation.
I'm in law school. I use my laptop to take notes whenever I can. There are two main advantages for me that I can't get with pen & paper:
(1) My computerized notes are searchable. This is very important toward the end of the semester when it comes time to outline the course.
(2) I can't read my own writing, but I can read my own typing.
I'm also faster with the computer than I am with pen & peper.
You're right about copying equations or diagrams. Luckily, those don't happen much in law school.