It's not any different from a shrinkwrap license. If you copy a work, you have to either do it under some license from the author or you're infringing. The case is easier here because the infringer was a magazine which should have been smart enough to know that it just can't grab pictures off websites, even if the website said "this is public."
THe problem with shrinkwrap licenses is not really that they exist, but that the terms are often quite onerous.
If you read the opinion, it's not particularly novel. Basically, it amounts to this:
"We lent you a laptop. You went to work for our competitors and used our laptop to help you do this. Instead of giving us the laptop back immediately, you installed some software on the laptop that we didn't authorize you to install and used it to get rid of all the information that we're interested in."
The court specifically found that the problem was installing the 'secure delete' software -- Posner said that applying the CFAA to just hitting the 'delete' key "might be stretching the statute too far." So, if the OS already had the secure delete software on it, there wouldn't be any problem.
Typically when you install software on your work computer, it's considered to be implicitly authorized by your employer. (That's the court's discussion about the agency relationship). But, once he stopped working for the company (or when he starting competing), that implicit authorization goes away. So, this decision probably doesn't affect you if you installed some secure delete software on your work computer months ago. It's when you do it for the purpose of hiding stuff from your (ex-) employer that you have problems.
In the situation you describe, monopolists just can't maintain their position. The McDonalds by me had a monopoly until Wendy's moved in. Broadband ISPs are typically in the same position -- it doesn't matter who got there first, most places have at least two providers: cable and DSL. Apart from expense (which always exists), there's very little stopping another provider from entering -- that's WiFi or broadband-over-power.
Once you have competition, you don't have to worry about 'unfettered industry' -- the competitor that doesn't give its customers what they want will lose business and will be forced to give up their anti-customer policies.
This may not be what you're talking about, but it is what I'm talking about. And, in fact, it appears to be what the bill is talking about, at least in part. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the bill itself on-line, but I did fine the press release: "Not being allowed to create a priority lane where content providers can buy quicker access to customers, while those who do not pay the fee are left in the slow lane;"
I'm suggesting that this applies as equally to content providers paying for QoS as it does for them paying for filtering by source.
I'm asserting that this bill is overbroad, because it keeps QoS from ever being useful on the Internet. It can be narrowed to allow ISPs to charge for QoS, but require ISPs to pass all packets without QoS.
In any case, the battle really isn't over access to say, google's search engine -- the ISPs know that if they started blocking popular sites like that, their customers would leave in droves. It's over the next generation of services -- things like high-quality video delivery. That need much more capacity than ISPs have now. In addition, they competes with services that the ISPs are either already offering (in the case of cable providers) or plan to offer soon (for telephone providers). So, the ISPS are concerned that if they increase capacity without being able to filter out (or at least charge for) that competing traffic, then they will actually lose revenue. So, if the ISPs aren't allowed to charge competitors (or their own customers), they simply won't grow the capacity of their networks.
The alternative is to allow the ISP to charge their customers for the services. This is something that phone companies already do -- you get unlimited local calls, but have to pay to call internantionally, say. I think this would actually be a bigger impediment to new services, as it would make it a lot harder for the content provider to pay the charges for some new service itself.
That doesn't work because senders will have different needs for QoS. For example, a site that streams video is much more impacted by packet loss than, say, most filesharing.
(1) I agree with your first sentence, but not with its implied conclusion. I was asserting that those providers who needed better quality would pay for it, and those that didn't would not. So, there is naturally some segregation by source: those sources that need QoS would be willing to pay for it. So, the distinction between "Source" and "Type" isn't particularly helpful.
(2) Analogies to phone companies are not really apropos -- traditional telephone service naturally has a single type of service, and is circuit-oriented. As a result, you can either make your call or you can't. If your local cell tower is already at capacity, then the next person can't get on. If the hardware at your local IP provider is at capacity, the next person can still get on -- it's just that doing so degades everybody else's connection.
My point was that if you want to have a world where you can't charge for disparate treatment, then the natural result is that everybody would be treated equally.
Treating everybody equally on a network is inefficient because there will always be people who are being treated equally, but wouldn't mind worse service much and there will be people who really need better service. By analogy, there have been days when I've been in a traffic jam and I'm not in a rush. But, some doctor driving to deliver a baby really is. Wouldn't it make sense to let the doctor pay a little to get ahead of me? That's why you see some places with toll lanes on the highway or see things like congestion charging.
TCP/IP has a native capacity to distinguish between different types of traffic so network routers can treat different packets differently. This is a good thing -- some applications are much more real-time intensive than other applications.
Unfortunately, the Quality of Service flags are generally ignored on the public Internet. The reason why isn't particularly hard to discern: there's no way to agree on what should have priority and what shouldn't. If everybody used it in the current environment, then every content provider would flag its own traffic as being high-priority. And, as a result, nothing would be high priority since it's a relative concept.
Money is the way to separate the wheat from the chaff: if your content actually depends on a high QoS, then you should pay for that. If your content doesn't, then there's no reason to.
Well, actually the standard for what the directors can do is pretty low. Directors are typically held to the "Business Judgment" rule, which basically means that unless you're clearly just throwing the corporation's money away, courts are not going to supplant your business decisions with their own. One of the advantages of being the largest shareholder is that you get to influence board policy the way that you want to. At a large corporation like Disney, other shareholder can just sell if they don't like it.
Heck, Look at the Disney/Ovitz thing -- if THAT wasn't a violation, then what makes you think tossing some business to Apple is?
Um, it's not the archive of US News Services -- they all have their own archives. This is everything in the national archive, which is typically all government-produced stuff. The U.S. government rarely throws anything away. Instead, it gets sent to the national archives. I expect that most of it will be quite boring for most people (like 1968 debates on tax reform), but some of it will be very interesting.
In any case, the article didn't call the US National Archives 'history of the world.' It said that putting the US national archives on the web is a great start to putting the "history of the world" on-line. [Presumably he meant the records of history, not the history itself.]
The really interesting part about this is that it's a giant step toward the use of the Internet as a legitimate video distribution technology. It's also a slap in the face of the telcos trying to defeat network neutrality. Now, there's an argument that says "what do you mean you don't want to allow google to distribute video over your network? Why don't you want people to be able to view the national archives? You must be a communist."
"Ok, ebbybudy. Heres de deal. Yous all vote for who we tells you to vote fur an nobuddy gets hurt. Wes gonna be collecting yer ballot receipts on de way out to make sure you did what we want"
I'll admit that's a bit extreme, but there are much less obvious ways: everybody who has a receipt showing who they voted for gets into the union hall tonight or at some office, it becomes a normal statement to post your voting receipt on the outside of your cube, etc.... What if some organization starting giving out $5 bills to homeless people who brought in a receipt that shows they voted for X, Y & Z?
Even under your restriction where the receipts are kept as backup, you still have the problem of what you do when the person says "This receipt is wrong. That's not who I voted for." What are you supposed to do now? What if they're lying? where did the bug happen? Did it happen before the vote got recorded or between the time it was recorded and when it was printed?
What's up with the personal attack? That's not cool. Did you even read the article?
The problem is not with current Internet services -- I don't think that my ISP ought to charge websites extra fee for, say, downloading music from iTunes or posting to Slashdot. After all, that's what I'm paying for now.
The bigger problem is that if ISPs roll out very-high-bandwidth networks, the are going to be opening up an entire new avenue of competition for their other services. Madison River, a telephone company that provides broadband internet, for example, blocked Vonage service unless their subscribers paid an extra fee. That got slapped down by the FCC under the old rules. Under the current regulatory scheme, however, it's not at all clear that the FCC has that authority. After all, that's why you see network neutrality proposals in Congress.
The problem is not really that your ISP will block, say, google's current search service. They are going to block video content from say movie studios -- the problem for them is that when their customers start doing pay-per-view over the Internet, they won't be doing it through the Cable company's pay-per-view service and the Cable Company doesn't get their cut. So, how much do you think the Cable company is going to want to roll out high-bandwidth services if the end result is that their revenue drops. You can claim competition from DSL providers, but all the phone companies want to provide TV also.
So, the problem with Network neutrality is that it opens up the DSL and Cable providers up to competition for their other service, and that'a a big disincentive for them to roll it out.
I wrote an article about this at the Duke Law & Technology Review.
My point was that Iraq probably would not have been invaded had it not been for 9/11, not that the rationale used for going in was justified. 9/11 changed the political climate enough to make the Iraqi invasion a possibility -- it would not have been possible beforehand.
(1) nobody claimed that Iraq had anything to do with the planning of 9/11. We do know that there were some contacts between some people in Iraq and some Al Quida members, but that's about it.
(2) I just can't understand why Hussein kicked all the inspectors out and basically acted like a big jerk if he didn't have any WMD. I don't know how you can say that Iraq was being cooperative -- heck, he kicked the inspectors out during the Clinton Administration, relying on the Lewinsky scandal to keep them out.
#1: I thought that's what, say, the Olso peace treaty or Nye river was about.
#2: a. We're only in Saudi Arabia at the pleasure of the Saudi government. If you have any issue, it's with them. b. We're only in Afghanistan because they were harboring people who decided to fly planes into 3 of our buildings c. Iraq wouldn't have been an issue if (2b) hadn't happened.
#3: a. If you have evidence of prosecution or torture on account of their religion, I'm interested. As far as I can tell, they're being held because of their association (or suspected association) with the folks who did (2b) or with people who want to do similar things. Even if there is torture going on, which is highly questionable, it's not targetted based on religion.
Nearly all of what you're complaining about happened AFTER 9/11. The fight is not against Islam in general, but against specific Muslims who have decided to pursue evil, claiming to be doing so in the name of their religion. Frankly, if the Muslim world had been policing itself before 9/11, none of this would be necessary.
Getting back to the main point, it isn't a question of "telling them the right stuff." There is propaganda on both sides -- based on your post, somebody is saying that the U.S. is rounding up Muslims and torturing them because of their religion. If we can say "No we're not, here's why not and here's why you can believe us," then at least it gives people the chance to make up their own minds.
Here's my answer to that, incidently: We're not picking on Muslims because of their religion -- that not only goes against our core beliefs, but it serves no useful purpose. Keeping & interrogating these prisoners is expensive, both in money and in public opinion. If we really wanted to oppress Muslims, why have we been helping so much after the earthquake in Pakistan? Why have we been giving aid to Palestine? Why have we been involved in the peace process? Why are we rebuilding Iraq? (And, why is the opposition indiscriminately killing Iraqi civilians?)
In the U.S., at least, the federal government does not have a general property tax -- these are the province of the states and municipalities. Such property taxes are typically levied on property that is relatively easy to value -- real estate, boats, cars etc.... These things are easy to value because it's easy to find near-equivalents for them. Want to know how much your car is worth? Find out the price a similar car was sold last week. Want to know how much your house is worth? Find similar recent sales in your neighborhood.
IP is not nearly as easy to value because each one is its own monopoly -- you just can't say "well, J.K. Rowling made $200M on her kids book. So, that's how much yours is worth." Figuring out the value of any individual patent or copyright is a lot of work. For media companies that create tens of thousands of such works per year, it's impossible. It's also complicated by the fact that, at least in the U.S., most things that we create are under copyright from birth. I own the copyright in this post, for example.
From a legal standpoint, it's called "Intellectual Property" because, just like property, there is a bundle of rights associated with it. For example, I have the right to exclude, the right to subdivide, the right to use, the right to transfer and so on. When somebody says "I own that land," they're really saying "I have a bundle of rights with regard to that land." It's the same thing with IP.
In regard to the grandparent post, referring the "ownership" of copyright -- the point of the cited statute is that it's possible to subdivide the copyright rights, just like it is to subdivide real property rights, and that when the statute talks about 'copyright,' it's referring to any of the rights -- i.e. there isn't any unitary indivisible "Copyright" any more than there's unitary indivisible "property ownership." [For those who think that there is, consider zoning, easements, leasehold, life estates, covenants and so on....]
Well, there's no doubt that there's a bigger problem than just myspace. Any system that relies on minors accurately reporting their age is seriously flawed. But, I don't think that the argument "well, porn sites do it, so it must be ok" will get very far. Talk about adopting the lowest common demoninator.
I would point you to R.I.A.A. v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F.3d 1072, noting that space-shifting is fine and that a computer isn't a Digital Audio Recording Device.
You are allowed to rip the CD (AHRA & Fair Use) and you're allowed to sell the CD (First sale doctrine). Once you've sold the CD, though, you no longer have an original work. So, any copying that you do of it -- including the copying from your disk drive into the memory of the computer -- is an infringement. You can't claim that this copying is fair use, because fair use relies on your having an original to begin with.
And this is why it's bad to take legal advice from Slashdot.
Where on earth do you get the idea that you can rip-and-sell? In the U.S, that's clearly a violation of S. 106(1) of the Copyright Act. You can claim fair use in space-shifting, but when you sell the original, you've gone well beyond that.
The best I can come up with is S 1008 of the Audio Home Recording Act, but (1) your computer isn't a "Digital Audio Recording Device" and (2) when you sell the CD, that's commercial.
If myspace actually were limited to those over 18, it would have what, maybe 10% of the subscribers it has now? Most of their growth is from people who aren't supposed to be there. Myspace is successful because kids lie about their ages.
There's a good analogy here to bars and alcohol -- if you're 13 and go to a bar, you can't just lie to the bouncer, say that you're 23 and expect to get in.
Myspace has created a web site that is very attractive for kids. They benefit from the large number of kids who lie about their ages. They accept the answer to the "how old are you" question at face value. Are you claiming that they have no responsibility to those kids? "Well, they're lying, so we have no responsibility?"
You cannot reasonably expect 13-year-olds to have developed the same judgment and sense of morality that a 25-year-old has. So, we shift partial responsibility for kids to the adults who deal with them -- that's why selling cigarettes and alcohol to minors is a crime and why there's a special crime called "statutory rape".
Sure, parents need to deal with this, but MySpace needs to be more responsible as well.
If that's true, then MusicShifter is infringing copyright -- this is exactly what mp3.com got spanked for a few years ago (with mp3.com, you didn't send in your CD, you just put it in your PC to prove that you had it).
Actually, both Cable Modem and DSL services have, for the most part, been deregulated. There is no "granting of monopolies" when it comes to broadband Internet.
Telephone and cable TV services have also been substantially deregulated. That's why you can get phone service from your cable company and (in many places) television service from your phone company. The main thing keeping competition out is just infrastructure costs.
Ignore for a second the fact that it's mainly the Telcos who are pushing for non-neturality... Imagine that you're the cable company and you're considering whether to invest a lot of money in taking your broadband internet service from 5 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s. If you do so, one of the main things your subscribers will do is watch high-quality video, including pay-per-view, over the Internet and they will stop buying your own pay-per-view service and may even cut back on their cable TV service. So, the total cost is the price of the roll-out plus the resulting drop in your video revenue. Will you do it?
The answer depend on whether you can get enough new revenue from the service to pay for that total cost. If you are limited to getting the revenue from your subscribers, will that affect your decision? After all, the more you charge, the fewer people will want the higher-speed service.
Telephone companies are in the same boat as cable providers -- they want to use the network to roll-out television as well.
Also recognize that video is much less tolerant of network problems than web-browsing -- if you miss a video packet, the video quality diminishes. If you miss an HTTP packet, it'll get retransmitted and you won't even notice. There has to be some way of distinguishing who gets the higher quality. If it's free, then everybody will mark their traffic as high priority and nobody will get priority.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not any different from a shrinkwrap license. If you copy a work, you have to either do it under some license from the author or you're infringing. The case is easier here because the infringer was a magazine which should have been smart enough to know that it just can't grab pictures off websites, even if the website said "this is public."
THe problem with shrinkwrap licenses is not really that they exist, but that the terms are often quite onerous.
If you read the opinion, it's not particularly novel. Basically, it amounts to this:
"We lent you a laptop. You went to work for our competitors and used our laptop to help you do this. Instead of giving us the laptop back immediately, you installed some software on the laptop that we didn't authorize you to install and used it to get rid of all the information that we're interested in."
The court specifically found that the problem was installing the 'secure delete' software -- Posner said that applying the CFAA to just hitting the 'delete' key "might be stretching the statute too far." So, if the OS already had the secure delete software on it, there wouldn't be any problem.
Typically when you install software on your work computer, it's considered to be implicitly authorized by your employer. (That's the court's discussion about the agency relationship). But, once he stopped working for the company (or when he starting competing), that implicit authorization goes away. So, this decision probably doesn't affect you if you installed some secure delete software on your work computer months ago. It's when you do it for the purpose of hiding stuff from your (ex-) employer that you have problems.
In the situation you describe, monopolists just can't maintain their position. The McDonalds by me had a monopoly until Wendy's moved in. Broadband ISPs are typically in the same position -- it doesn't matter who got there first, most places have at least two providers: cable and DSL. Apart from expense (which always exists), there's very little stopping another provider from entering -- that's WiFi or broadband-over-power.
Once you have competition, you don't have to worry about 'unfettered industry' -- the competitor that doesn't give its customers what they want will lose business and will be forced to give up their anti-customer policies.
This may not be what you're talking about, but it is what I'm talking about. And, in fact, it appears to be what the bill is talking about, at least in part. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the bill itself on-line, but I did fine the press release: "Not being allowed to create a priority lane where content providers can buy quicker access to customers, while those who do not pay the fee are left in the slow lane;" I'm suggesting that this applies as equally to content providers paying for QoS as it does for them paying for filtering by source.
So, we're arguing at different points.
I'm asserting that this bill is overbroad, because it keeps QoS from ever being useful on the Internet. It can be narrowed to allow ISPs to charge for QoS, but require ISPs to pass all packets without QoS.
In any case, the battle really isn't over access to say, google's search engine -- the ISPs know that if they started blocking popular sites like that, their customers would leave in droves. It's over the next generation of services -- things like high-quality video delivery. That need much more capacity than ISPs have now. In addition, they competes with services that the ISPs are either already offering (in the case of cable providers) or plan to offer soon (for telephone providers). So, the ISPS are concerned that if they increase capacity without being able to filter out (or at least charge for) that competing traffic, then they will actually lose revenue. So, if the ISPs aren't allowed to charge competitors (or their own customers), they simply won't grow the capacity of their networks.
The alternative is to allow the ISP to charge their customers for the services. This is something that phone companies already do -- you get unlimited local calls, but have to pay to call internantionally, say. I think this would actually be a bigger impediment to new services, as it would make it a lot harder for the content provider to pay the charges for some new service itself.
That doesn't work because senders will have different needs for QoS. For example, a site that streams video is much more impacted by packet loss than, say, most filesharing.
Well, a few things:
(1) I agree with your first sentence, but not with its implied conclusion. I was asserting that those providers who needed better quality would pay for it, and those that didn't would not. So, there is naturally some segregation by source: those sources that need QoS would be willing to pay for it. So, the distinction between "Source" and "Type" isn't particularly helpful.
(2) Analogies to phone companies are not really apropos -- traditional telephone service naturally has a single type of service, and is circuit-oriented. As a result, you can either make your call or you can't. If your local cell tower is already at capacity, then the next person can't get on. If the hardware at your local IP provider is at capacity, the next person can still get on -- it's just that doing so degades everybody else's connection.
My point was that if you want to have a world where you can't charge for disparate treatment, then the natural result is that everybody would be treated equally.
Treating everybody equally on a network is inefficient because there will always be people who are being treated equally, but wouldn't mind worse service much and there will be people who really need better service. By analogy, there have been days when I've been in a traffic jam and I'm not in a rush. But, some doctor driving to deliver a baby really is. Wouldn't it make sense to let the doctor pay a little to get ahead of me? That's why you see some places with toll lanes on the highway or see things like congestion charging.
TCP/IP has a native capacity to distinguish between different types of traffic so network routers can treat different packets differently. This is a good thing -- some applications are much more real-time intensive than other applications.
Unfortunately, the Quality of Service flags are generally ignored on the public Internet. The reason why isn't particularly hard to discern: there's no way to agree on what should have priority and what shouldn't. If everybody used it in the current environment, then every content provider would flag its own traffic as being high-priority. And, as a result, nothing would be high priority since it's a relative concept.
Money is the way to separate the wheat from the chaff: if your content actually depends on a high QoS, then you should pay for that. If your content doesn't, then there's no reason to.
It was a shareholder suit. The shareholders lost.
Well, actually the standard for what the directors can do is pretty low. Directors are typically held to the "Business Judgment" rule, which basically means that unless you're clearly just throwing the corporation's money away, courts are not going to supplant your business decisions with their own. One of the advantages of being the largest shareholder is that you get to influence board policy the way that you want to. At a large corporation like Disney, other shareholder can just sell if they don't like it.
Heck, Look at the Disney/Ovitz thing -- if THAT wasn't a violation, then what makes you think tossing some business to Apple is?
Um, it's not the archive of US News Services -- they all have their own archives. This is everything in the national archive, which is typically all government-produced stuff. The U.S. government rarely throws anything away. Instead, it gets sent to the national archives. I expect that most of it will be quite boring for most people (like 1968 debates on tax reform), but some of it will be very interesting.
In any case, the article didn't call the US National Archives 'history of the world.' It said that putting the US national archives on the web is a great start to putting the "history of the world" on-line. [Presumably he meant the records of history, not the history itself.]
The really interesting part about this is that it's a giant step toward the use of the Internet as a legitimate video distribution technology. It's also a slap in the face of the telcos trying to defeat network neutrality. Now, there's an argument that says "what do you mean you don't want to allow google to distribute video over your network? Why don't you want people to be able to view the national archives? You must be a communist."
Here's one potential problem scenario:
"Ok, ebbybudy. Heres de deal. Yous all vote for who we tells you to vote fur an nobuddy gets hurt. Wes gonna be collecting yer ballot receipts on de way out to make sure you did what we want"
I'll admit that's a bit extreme, but there are much less obvious ways: everybody who has a receipt showing who they voted for gets into the union hall tonight or at some office, it becomes a normal statement to post your voting receipt on the outside of your cube, etc.... What if some organization starting giving out $5 bills to homeless people who brought in a receipt that shows they voted for X, Y & Z?
Even under your restriction where the receipts are kept as backup, you still have the problem of what you do when the person says "This receipt is wrong. That's not who I voted for." What are you supposed to do now? What if they're lying? where did the bug happen? Did it happen before the vote got recorded or between the time it was recorded and when it was printed?
What's up with the personal attack? That's not cool. Did you even read the article?
The problem is not with current Internet services -- I don't think that my ISP ought to charge websites extra fee for, say, downloading music from iTunes or posting to Slashdot. After all, that's what I'm paying for now.
The bigger problem is that if ISPs roll out very-high-bandwidth networks, the are going to be opening up an entire new avenue of competition for their other services. Madison River, a telephone company that provides broadband internet, for example, blocked Vonage service unless their subscribers paid an extra fee. That got slapped down by the FCC under the old rules. Under the current regulatory scheme, however, it's not at all clear that the FCC has that authority. After all, that's why you see network neutrality proposals in Congress.
The problem is not really that your ISP will block, say, google's current search service. They are going to block video content from say movie studios -- the problem for them is that when their customers start doing pay-per-view over the Internet, they won't be doing it through the Cable company's pay-per-view service and the Cable Company doesn't get their cut. So, how much do you think the Cable company is going to want to roll out high-bandwidth services if the end result is that their revenue drops. You can claim competition from DSL providers, but all the phone companies want to provide TV also.
So, the problem with Network neutrality is that it opens up the DSL and Cable providers up to competition for their other service, and that'a a big disincentive for them to roll it out. I wrote an article about this at the Duke Law & Technology Review.
My point was that Iraq probably would not have been invaded had it not been for 9/11, not that the rationale used for going in was justified. 9/11 changed the political climate enough to make the Iraqi invasion a possibility -- it would not have been possible beforehand.
(1) nobody claimed that Iraq had anything to do with the planning of 9/11. We do know that there were some contacts between some people in Iraq and some Al Quida members, but that's about it.
(2) I just can't understand why Hussein kicked all the inspectors out and basically acted like a big jerk if he didn't have any WMD. I don't know how you can say that Iraq was being cooperative -- heck, he kicked the inspectors out during the Clinton Administration, relying on the Lewinsky scandal to keep them out.
(3) Ritter isn't exactly the most trustworthy source -- see http://www.slate.com/id/2071502 for example.
Interesting...
#1: I thought that's what, say, the Olso peace treaty or Nye river was about.
#2:
a. We're only in Saudi Arabia at the pleasure of the Saudi government. If you have any issue, it's with them.
b. We're only in Afghanistan because they were harboring people who decided to fly planes into 3 of our buildings
c. Iraq wouldn't have been an issue if (2b) hadn't happened.
#3:
a. If you have evidence of prosecution or torture on account of their religion, I'm interested. As far as I can tell, they're being held because of their association (or suspected association) with the folks who did (2b) or with people who want to do similar things. Even if there is torture going on, which is highly questionable, it's not targetted based on religion.
Nearly all of what you're complaining about happened AFTER 9/11. The fight is not against Islam in general, but against specific Muslims who have decided to pursue evil, claiming to be doing so in the name of their religion. Frankly, if the Muslim world had been policing itself before 9/11, none of this would be necessary.
Getting back to the main point, it isn't a question of "telling them the right stuff." There is propaganda on both sides -- based on your post, somebody is saying that the U.S. is rounding up Muslims and torturing them because of their religion. If we can say "No we're not, here's why not and here's why you can believe us," then at least it gives people the chance to make up their own minds.
Here's my answer to that, incidently: We're not picking on Muslims because of their religion -- that not only goes against our core beliefs, but it serves no useful purpose. Keeping & interrogating these prisoners is expensive, both in money and in public opinion. If we really wanted to oppress Muslims, why have we been helping so much after the earthquake in Pakistan? Why have we been giving aid to Palestine? Why have we been involved in the peace process? Why are we rebuilding Iraq? (And, why is the opposition indiscriminately killing Iraqi civilians?)
In the U.S., at least, the federal government does not have a general property tax -- these are the province of the states and municipalities. Such property taxes are typically levied on property that is relatively easy to value -- real estate, boats, cars etc.... These things are easy to value because it's easy to find near-equivalents for them. Want to know how much your car is worth? Find out the price a similar car was sold last week. Want to know how much your house is worth? Find similar recent sales in your neighborhood.
IP is not nearly as easy to value because each one is its own monopoly -- you just can't say "well, J.K. Rowling made $200M on her kids book. So, that's how much yours is worth." Figuring out the value of any individual patent or copyright is a lot of work. For media companies that create tens of thousands of such works per year, it's impossible. It's also complicated by the fact that, at least in the U.S., most things that we create are under copyright from birth. I own the copyright in this post, for example.
From a legal standpoint, it's called "Intellectual Property" because, just like property, there is a bundle of rights associated with it. For example, I have the right to exclude, the right to subdivide, the right to use, the right to transfer and so on. When somebody says "I own that land," they're really saying "I have a bundle of rights with regard to that land." It's the same thing with IP.
In regard to the grandparent post, referring the "ownership" of copyright -- the point of the cited statute is that it's possible to subdivide the copyright rights, just like it is to subdivide real property rights, and that when the statute talks about 'copyright,' it's referring to any of the rights -- i.e. there isn't any unitary indivisible "Copyright" any more than there's unitary indivisible "property ownership." [For those who think that there is, consider zoning, easements, leasehold, life estates, covenants and so on....]
Well, there's no doubt that there's a bigger problem than just myspace. Any system that relies on minors accurately reporting their age is seriously flawed. But, I don't think that the argument "well, porn sites do it, so it must be ok" will get very far. Talk about adopting the lowest common demoninator.
I would point you to R.I.A.A. v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F.3d 1072, noting that space-shifting is fine and that a computer isn't a Digital Audio Recording Device.
You are allowed to rip the CD (AHRA & Fair Use) and you're allowed to sell the CD (First sale doctrine). Once you've sold the CD, though, you no longer have an original work. So, any copying that you do of it -- including the copying from your disk drive into the memory of the computer -- is an infringement. You can't claim that this copying is fair use, because fair use relies on your having an original to begin with.
And this is why it's bad to take legal advice from Slashdot.
Where on earth do you get the idea that you can rip-and-sell? In the U.S, that's clearly a violation of S. 106(1) of the Copyright Act. You can claim fair use in space-shifting, but when you sell the original, you've gone well beyond that.
The best I can come up with is S 1008 of the Audio Home Recording Act, but (1) your computer isn't a "Digital Audio Recording Device" and (2) when you sell the CD, that's commercial.
If myspace actually were limited to those over 18, it would have what, maybe 10% of the subscribers it has now? Most of their growth is from people who aren't supposed to be there. Myspace is successful because kids lie about their ages.
There's a good analogy here to bars and alcohol -- if you're 13 and go to a bar, you can't just lie to the bouncer, say that you're 23 and expect to get in.
Myspace has created a web site that is very attractive for kids. They benefit from the large number of kids who lie about their ages. They accept the answer to the "how old are you" question at face value. Are you claiming that they have no responsibility to those kids? "Well, they're lying, so we have no responsibility?"
You cannot reasonably expect 13-year-olds to have developed the same judgment and sense of morality that a 25-year-old has. So, we shift partial responsibility for kids to the adults who deal with them -- that's why selling cigarettes and alcohol to minors is a crime and why there's a special crime called "statutory rape".
Sure, parents need to deal with this, but MySpace needs to be more responsible as well.
If that's true, then MusicShifter is infringing copyright -- this is exactly what mp3.com got spanked for a few years ago (with mp3.com, you didn't send in your CD, you just put it in your PC to prove that you had it).
Actually, both Cable Modem and DSL services have, for the most part, been deregulated. There is no "granting of monopolies" when it comes to broadband Internet.
Telephone and cable TV services have also been substantially deregulated. That's why you can get phone service from your cable company and (in many places) television service from your phone company. The main thing keeping competition out is just infrastructure costs.
Ignore for a second the fact that it's mainly the Telcos who are pushing for non-neturality... Imagine that you're the cable company and you're considering whether to invest a lot of money in taking your broadband internet service from 5 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s. If you do so, one of the main things your subscribers will do is watch high-quality video, including pay-per-view, over the Internet and they will stop buying your own pay-per-view service and may even cut back on their cable TV service. So, the total cost is the price of the roll-out plus the resulting drop in your video revenue. Will you do it?
The answer depend on whether you can get enough new revenue from the service to pay for that total cost. If you are limited to getting the revenue from your subscribers, will that affect your decision? After all, the more you charge, the fewer people will want the higher-speed service.
Telephone companies are in the same boat as cable providers -- they want to use the network to roll-out television as well.
Also recognize that video is much less tolerant of network problems than web-browsing -- if you miss a video packet, the video quality diminishes. If you miss an HTTP packet, it'll get retransmitted and you won't even notice. There has to be some way of distinguishing who gets the higher quality. If it's free, then everybody will mark their traffic as high priority and nobody will get priority.