So, I write those contracts. That's often a default provision because if you don't know what open source software you're getting, you might accidentally run afoul of the requirement to make the Source Code available. If there is open source software in a product to be delivered, I would expect the supplier to look at the contract and then tell my client "we can't sign this because we DO have open source software in our code." Then, that starts a discussion about what open source software is involved, the redistribution requirements, etc.... In effect, it's a way of (1) eliciting information and (2) getting somebody to sue if they didn't disclose something that gets my client in trouble.
(That said, there are lawyers who don't understand it at all, and just put that in contracts out of paranoia.)
No, I'm saying that those terms apply to all users, irrespective of Section 5.
The reason for shouting is bizarre -- there was an old contracts case where a manufacturer disclaimed a bunch of warranties, just like what you see in the GPL, but did it in lower-case. The decision came down that since the manufacturer had hidden these very important disclaimers deep down in the contract, they weren't enforceable. If you had important terms that affected peoples rights, then you had to do something to make them stand out, like put them in all-caps. From then on, lawyers have been putting these terms in all-caps.
It's idiotic -- why is that more important than, say, the indemnification provisions? But, that's the way it is. And, often, the capitalized part is not particularly relevant. But, it's still in caps.
You're right. That is a problem. In general, the fallback then is to go to the manufacturer. Oddly, manufacturers aren't equipped to deal with it.
A warranty is a contract term. Acceptance of the EULA becomes part of the sale contract. My point is that this is just another example of "pictures on the outside, terms on the inside." I should note that this idea is straight from when software did get its day in court -- it's from either the Gateway decision or the ProCD decision.
At least in the US, that's not generally true. The general rule now is that EULA are enforceable if you have notice that there are additional terms and an ability to return the software once you have had a chance to review the terms. The "notice of terms" often happens with a brief notice on the outside of the box.
When you buy a TV, the warranty comes inside the box. And, nobody says that's not binding. Why is software different?
The law is still up in the air abit, largely because there are very few cases where it comes up.
That is a popular misnomer. Please read sections 11 & 12 of version 2 (the parts in ALL-CAPS). Those absolutely apply to USERS of GPL software, not just to people who distribute it.
Big difference. If Obama is going to push for harmful policies, I want him to be unsuccessful at getting those policies implemented. If he's going to push for good policies, I want those efforts to succeed. I want him to be successful in results.
At the same time, if he pushes for dumb policies and successfully gets them passed, I want their failure to be spectacular, because only a spectacular failure would keep future presidents from trying the same thing.
Yes. There is a strong preference in US law for cases to be decided on their merits. Under the federal rules of civil procedure, a judge can set aside a judgment for "good cause" or in the case of "mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect" or "any other reason that justifies relief."
When you buy something from somebody else, there is a contract of sale that determines the terms and conditions of the sale. The terms of the contract can be in writing, be given orally, or (in the absence of either of those), will go to a set of default terms.
If there's a written contract between a manufacturer and a distributor, one of the terms that the manufacturer can put in the contract is "You will not resell this at less than $X." Or, in this case, "You will not advertise this at less than $X."
It used to be that these clauses were always illegal under US Antitrust law -- it's called "Resale Price Maintenance" (RPM). The Supreme Court's decision said "These are not *always* illegal. Instead, you have to look at the facts and circumstances of the particular case to see if it is illegal."
It's not at all clear that RPM is always a bad thing. If there's a competitive market across product lines, then it doesn't really matter because consumers can always go elsewhere.
That said, I think they're going to get in trouble with bogus claims of copyright and trademark infringement. At best, they might be able to demand that people take their own pictures of the products. But, somebody's going to need to take them on.
I'm unaware of the "law" you're talking about. In the US, the law of contracts is pretty well-settled (a lot of people depend on it not changing, so state legislatures and courts don't like to change the rules.)
In any case, the problem is usually that people don't bother reading these agreements. They're not really that hard to read. If you don't read the agreement, that's your own fault. Unconscionable provisions will get struck, but if you agree to something knowing that you don't understand it, then you've taken that risk. (You can always consult a lawyer.)
In any case, if you're right that 99% of users don't understand overselling, then how do you propose that ISPs sell their services -- it's already advertised as "up to 6mbps"?
Who's lying? When you sign up for service, you're handed a piece of paper that tells you exactly what you're getting and exactly what you can do with it. Why didn't you read that paper?
What does it mean that a line is "sold as a 10mbit line"? Why do you choose to read the word "dedicated" into that instead of the word "shared" like most educated people do?
Every utility in the world is oversold. You probably have a 200amp connection from the power company. But, guess what happens if everybody in your town decides to turn on their air conditioners at the same time? You probably have something like 50psi water service. But, guess what happens if everybody turns on the sprinklers at once. Natural gas, cell phones and landline phones all work the same way.
Read your terms of service -- I'm guessing they spell out *exactly* what you're buying.
Ehh... TCP has no "guarantee" of reliability, either. It only has a guarantee that information will arrive at the receiver in the same order that they're sent from the sender. But, there is no guarantee that it will be possible to send any packet. For that, you either need to deal with the ability to reserve bandwidth or otherwise differentiate traffic at a low-level.
UPD is the basis of the Real-Time Protocol (RTP), which is used for VoIP and various video applications. If you're going to drop UDP packets willy-nilly, you're seriously going to impact call quality.
If uTorrent wants to do this, fine. But, they should also figure out how to throttle back if packets start getting lost. Otherwise, they'll drown out all the other traffic on the 'net.
You can't take that too far. It's possible, for example, to patent a chemical process that's performed by humans. It doesn't need to be automated to be patentable.
So, I understand that it's not the best public relations move, but consider the alternatives:
1. Call in to EA, wait in the call queue, then scan or fax your current product code, then have EA figure out what the right last character is (or just send you a new one), then enter in the new one. Total elapsed time: 30 minutes, if you're lucky.
2. Try all 36 combinations, presuming that it doesn't make you retype your entire code each time. Total elapsed time: 3 minutes.
If it were me, I would have taken option 2.
The critical thing here is that they told everybody which digit was missing -- without that information, the minor 3 minutes nuisance would have turned into a much bigger problem.
The main problem with the economy was lowering of lending standards -- if everybody had put 20% down, paid no more than 28% of their monthly income to their mortgage and paid no more than 35% of their income to repay debt (the old standard), this never would have happened.
So, the question is: why did banks reduce those standards? It's largely because Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and the FHA were willing back and/or buy loans with lower standards. So, why did they do that? And, the answer is they were under pressure from Congressional Democrats and from the President to "increase home ownership." Heck, the Community Redevelopment Act specifically encouraged banks to make these "subprime" loans.
If you want to blame the President for the economic mess, then you have to show that the Democrats made an issue and seriously pushed for serious reforms that would have prevented this mess. There is little evidence of this. McCain did co-sponsor one bill a few years ago that went nowhere, but he certainly didn't appear to push for it much.
The long-term solution will be to return to reasonable lending standards, which means abandoning this idea of homeownership being the path to prosperity. There's no shame in renting.
Not exactly. The President looks at the previous year's budget, makes changes that he wants to see and submits the result to Congress. Congress votes against that budget, and it dies.
Having disposed of the President's budget, the Congress starts over with the previous year's budget and makes changes that it wants.
Sure, the President still has to approve the budget, but there's very little he can do at this stage -- it's a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. He can suggest further changes, but unless he's willing to kill the whole thing, he has no way to implement them.
What makes you think you're safe on copyright issues? You didn't mention what you're scraping, but if it's somebody else's expression, your company could have a very big problem.
Depending on a number of factors, Terms of Service are legally binding, so there are going to be legal problems for you there.
How big of a company are you? Do you have a general counsel? If you do, you might want to raise your concerns with him/her. Are you a public company?
When I have been involved in hiring decisions, a big question is whether we can trust the candidate. So, candidates that talk about how bad their last employer was naturally raise a question about what they'll say if they leave us. BUT, I would actually be more inclined to hire somebody who, when faced with an ethically questionable activity, went through the right channels to resolve the problem and eventually decided to leave rather than compromise his integrity. You can still say "Overall, it was a great place to work, but I was asked to do something severely unethical and I chose to resign instead."
I agree that it would be unusual for the appeal to be granted. But, it does make some sense -- if, on retrial, Thomas wins with the new instruction, then the RIAA will appeal to the 8th circuit on the jury instruction. And, if the 8th circuit agrees with the "Making Available" theory, then the case would go back to the district court where a new jury would have to, again, decide if she made the works available. (Once the second trial has started, I don't think you can go back to the outcome of the first.)
Do you also apply that to physical goods? A lot of illegal drugs, counterfeit goods and other contraband is discovered through border searches where there was no probable cause.
It may not be right, but it's long-standing law that the government doesn't need probably cause at the border. That's the law.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I write those contracts. That's often a default provision because if you don't know what open source software you're getting, you might accidentally run afoul of the requirement to make the Source Code available. If there is open source software in a product to be delivered, I would expect the supplier to look at the contract and then tell my client "we can't sign this because we DO have open source software in our code." Then, that starts a discussion about what open source software is involved, the redistribution requirements, etc.... In effect, it's a way of (1) eliciting information and (2) getting somebody to sue if they didn't disclose something that gets my client in trouble.
(That said, there are lawyers who don't understand it at all, and just put that in contracts out of paranoia.)
You're right. They should just lay them off and hire new people overseas. That's a much better way to treat them.
Whether it should be different is really a different question. In the US, software EULAs have been rather consistently enforced.
The recent Blizzard case, http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/Blizzard_v_bnetd/20040930BNETDOrder.pdf , is an example. See p. 18.
No, I'm saying that those terms apply to all users, irrespective of Section 5.
The reason for shouting is bizarre -- there was an old contracts case where a manufacturer disclaimed a bunch of warranties, just like what you see in the GPL, but did it in lower-case. The decision came down that since the manufacturer had hidden these very important disclaimers deep down in the contract, they weren't enforceable. If you had important terms that affected peoples rights, then you had to do something to make them stand out, like put them in all-caps. From then on, lawyers have been putting these terms in all-caps.
It's idiotic -- why is that more important than, say, the indemnification provisions? But, that's the way it is. And, often, the capitalized part is not particularly relevant. But, it's still in caps.
You're right. That is a problem. In general, the fallback then is to go to the manufacturer. Oddly, manufacturers aren't equipped to deal with it.
A warranty is a contract term. Acceptance of the EULA becomes part of the sale contract. My point is that this is just another example of "pictures on the outside, terms on the inside." I should note that this idea is straight from when software did get its day in court -- it's from either the Gateway decision or the ProCD decision.
At least in the US, that's not generally true. The general rule now is that EULA are enforceable if you have notice that there are additional terms and an ability to return the software once you have had a chance to review the terms. The "notice of terms" often happens with a brief notice on the outside of the box.
When you buy a TV, the warranty comes inside the box. And, nobody says that's not binding. Why is software different?
The law is still up in the air abit, largely because there are very few cases where it comes up.
That is a popular misnomer. Please read sections 11 & 12 of version 2 (the parts in ALL-CAPS). Those absolutely apply to USERS of GPL software, not just to people who distribute it.
Considering that Fannie Mae has been losing billions every week, the idea of only losing a few million for a week sounds like a great idea.
Big difference. If Obama is going to push for harmful policies, I want him to be unsuccessful at getting those policies implemented. If he's going to push for good policies, I want those efforts to succeed. I want him to be successful in results.
At the same time, if he pushes for dumb policies and successfully gets them passed, I want their failure to be spectacular, because only a spectacular failure would keep future presidents from trying the same thing.
I thought the same thing about Bush.
Yes. There is a strong preference in US law for cases to be decided on their merits. Under the federal rules of civil procedure, a judge can set aside a judgment for "good cause" or in the case of "mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect" or "any other reason that justifies relief."
When you buy something from somebody else, there is a contract of sale that determines the terms and conditions of the sale. The terms of the contract can be in writing, be given orally, or (in the absence of either of those), will go to a set of default terms.
If there's a written contract between a manufacturer and a distributor, one of the terms that the manufacturer can put in the contract is "You will not resell this at less than $X." Or, in this case, "You will not advertise this at less than $X."
It used to be that these clauses were always illegal under US Antitrust law -- it's called "Resale Price Maintenance" (RPM). The Supreme Court's decision said "These are not *always* illegal. Instead, you have to look at the facts and circumstances of the particular case to see if it is illegal."
It's not at all clear that RPM is always a bad thing. If there's a competitive market across product lines, then it doesn't really matter because consumers can always go elsewhere.
That said, I think they're going to get in trouble with bogus claims of copyright and trademark infringement. At best, they might be able to demand that people take their own pictures of the products. But, somebody's going to need to take them on.
I'm unaware of the "law" you're talking about. In the US, the law of contracts is pretty well-settled (a lot of people depend on it not changing, so state legislatures and courts don't like to change the rules.)
In any case, the problem is usually that people don't bother reading these agreements. They're not really that hard to read. If you don't read the agreement, that's your own fault. Unconscionable provisions will get struck, but if you agree to something knowing that you don't understand it, then you've taken that risk. (You can always consult a lawyer.)
In any case, if you're right that 99% of users don't understand overselling, then how do you propose that ISPs sell their services -- it's already advertised as "up to 6mbps"?
Who's lying? When you sign up for service, you're handed a piece of paper that tells you exactly what you're getting and exactly what you can do with it. Why didn't you read that paper?
What does it mean that a line is "sold as a 10mbit line"? Why do you choose to read the word "dedicated" into that instead of the word "shared" like most educated people do?
Every utility in the world is oversold. You probably have a 200amp connection from the power company. But, guess what happens if everybody in your town decides to turn on their air conditioners at the same time? You probably have something like 50psi water service. But, guess what happens if everybody turns on the sprinklers at once. Natural gas, cell phones and landline phones all work the same way.
Read your terms of service -- I'm guessing they spell out *exactly* what you're buying.
Ehh... TCP has no "guarantee" of reliability, either. It only has a guarantee that information will arrive at the receiver in the same order that they're sent from the sender. But, there is no guarantee that it will be possible to send any packet. For that, you either need to deal with the ability to reserve bandwidth or otherwise differentiate traffic at a low-level.
UPD is the basis of the Real-Time Protocol (RTP), which is used for VoIP and various video applications. If you're going to drop UDP packets willy-nilly, you're seriously going to impact call quality.
If uTorrent wants to do this, fine. But, they should also figure out how to throttle back if packets start getting lost. Otherwise, they'll drown out all the other traffic on the 'net.
You can't take that too far. It's possible, for example, to patent a chemical process that's performed by humans. It doesn't need to be automated to be patentable.
And we green-screen something behind our reporter to make it seem like something is there when it really isn't.
Sweet! Thanks.
lp *
(Sure, you can select a bunch of things in Windows and print, but it tends to tie up your desktop. lp doesn't.)
in csh:
foreach f ( * )
mv $f $f.backup
end
(Please don't start a "don't program in csh" flamewar. It's just an easy 3 liner.)
So, I understand that it's not the best public relations move, but consider the alternatives:
1. Call in to EA, wait in the call queue, then scan or fax your current product code, then have EA figure out what the right last character is (or just send you a new one), then enter in the new one. Total elapsed time: 30 minutes, if you're lucky.
2. Try all 36 combinations, presuming that it doesn't make you retype your entire code each time. Total elapsed time: 3 minutes.
If it were me, I would have taken option 2.
The critical thing here is that they told everybody which digit was missing -- without that information, the minor 3 minutes nuisance would have turned into a much bigger problem.
What is "everything [Bush] did"?
The main problem with the economy was lowering of lending standards -- if everybody had put 20% down, paid no more than 28% of their monthly income to their mortgage and paid no more than 35% of their income to repay debt (the old standard), this never would have happened.
So, the question is: why did banks reduce those standards? It's largely because Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and the FHA were willing back and/or buy loans with lower standards. So, why did they do that? And, the answer is they were under pressure from Congressional Democrats and from the President to "increase home ownership." Heck, the Community Redevelopment Act specifically encouraged banks to make these "subprime" loans.
If you want to blame the President for the economic mess, then you have to show that the Democrats made an issue and seriously pushed for serious reforms that would have prevented this mess. There is little evidence of this. McCain did co-sponsor one bill a few years ago that went nowhere, but he certainly didn't appear to push for it much.
The long-term solution will be to return to reasonable lending standards, which means abandoning this idea of homeownership being the path to prosperity. There's no shame in renting.
Not exactly. The President looks at the previous year's budget, makes changes that he wants to see and submits the result to Congress. Congress votes against that budget, and it dies.
Having disposed of the President's budget, the Congress starts over with the previous year's budget and makes changes that it wants.
Sure, the President still has to approve the budget, but there's very little he can do at this stage -- it's a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. He can suggest further changes, but unless he's willing to kill the whole thing, he has no way to implement them.
What makes you think you're safe on copyright issues? You didn't mention what you're scraping, but if it's somebody else's expression, your company could have a very big problem.
Depending on a number of factors, Terms of Service are legally binding, so there are going to be legal problems for you there.
How big of a company are you? Do you have a general counsel? If you do, you might want to raise your concerns with him/her. Are you a public company?
When I have been involved in hiring decisions, a big question is whether we can trust the candidate. So, candidates that talk about how bad their last employer was naturally raise a question about what they'll say if they leave us. BUT, I would actually be more inclined to hire somebody who, when faced with an ethically questionable activity, went through the right channels to resolve the problem and eventually decided to leave rather than compromise his integrity. You can still say "Overall, it was a great place to work, but I was asked to do something severely unethical and I chose to resign instead."
I agree that it would be unusual for the appeal to be granted. But, it does make some sense -- if, on retrial, Thomas wins with the new instruction, then the RIAA will appeal to the 8th circuit on the jury instruction. And, if the 8th circuit agrees with the "Making Available" theory, then the case would go back to the district court where a new jury would have to, again, decide if she made the works available. (Once the second trial has started, I don't think you can go back to the outcome of the first.)
How many juries do we need?
Do you also apply that to physical goods? A lot of illegal drugs, counterfeit goods and other contraband is discovered through border searches where there was no probable cause.
It may not be right, but it's long-standing law that the government doesn't need probably cause at the border. That's the law.