It's the opposite for me. I actually intended my Yahoo account to be the spam sink, and I use it for all websites that require me to give them an email address, but I never get true unsolicited spam on that account. (Just limited "newsletters" from the companies themselves that keep "forgetting" my mailing preferences.)
Gmail was the one I intend for true personal email. Even with 70-80% of spam blocked, the account was useless within a month or two. Given how little I email back and forth with people, I was getting less than 1% signal to noise ratio. I haven't checked the account in over a year now; I wonder if Google's already deleted it.
I was shocked to check a rarely-used Gmail account today and find 10K emails caught as spam and another 10K NOT caught. This is unlike Gmail.:(
This is part of why I stopped using GMail within a single month of signing up. I gave out my new email address to a handful of people, but pretty quickly after signing up, I started to get volumes of spam which were ungodly. Given security problems like the recent Calendar issue, I'm not surprised that GMail is such a spam sink -- it seems like they don't do hardly anything to protect your email address from public knowledge.
GMail is useless. I wish I could just delete my account permanently. I should probably look into doing that.
I do hope you realize that the link you made to "your" profile does nothing for any of us. I mean, did you even look at the URL to notice that there's nothing that uniquely identifies your account in it?
Honestly. If it's truly "mind-blowing" and revolutionary, then how exactly is your average Slashdotter going to have heard of it? I mean, have you read the comments on any science article recently? What about that impressed you with the idea that people here are a good source of scientific insight?
I think it is hilarious that all these environmental wacko hippies get all crazy about CO2 being emitted in excess. Do you know that there's something perfectly natural that eats up CO2? They are called p-l-a-n-t-s. That's right, the more CO2 in the air, the better plants grow.
Not necessarily. It helps in some ways and hurts in others. You've got to stop thinking in terms of first-order effects alone.
It almost seems as if this earth were designed in such a way that we couldn't mess it up.
Sorry, I just had to chuckle at that one. I'm just reminded of how if you idiot-proof something, they'll invent a better idiot.
I object to this assessment. If it wasn't illegal then justice has been served. Justice is defined as the fair application of the law--it's not always right, but it's just.
That's your idea of justice, but that's not mine. What she did was abhorrent (assuming it's as the media has reported). The lack of a law specifically condemning it does not make her walking free for it "justice." The law seeks to achieve justice; the law is not justice itself, and unjust laws may exist.
If you start saying that actions which are not illegal but are found by some set of society to be deplorable can (or, rather, *should*) be prosecutable, then you've stepped off the road of liberty. How can I be held responsible for doing things that I don't see as wrong and which no law prohibits? Must every person fear that anything not explicitly allowed by law could result in criminal prosecution because *someone* decided they did not like it? This is a direct contradiction of the constitution!
Now this is addressing a different question -- one of whether we should have rule of law. I do agree on that. That's not the question I was addressing. The real question is quite different.
(Let's put aside for a second the fact that almost anyone would condemn her acts, so this wouldn't exactly fall into the seemingly arbitrary, "*someone* decided" category that you try to paint this as.)
The real question here is, "Should the prosecutors use every law that *is* on the books and which she *is* responsible for upholding to achieve the maximum sentence when a more lax reading of criminal statutes would result in a slap on the wrist?"
I say, yes. If that means pulling out little used, obscure statutes or creative interpretation to achieve that goal, then that's still fair. After all, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Anyone with any sense knows that what she did was *wrong.* The only question here is whether there is a strong enough sentence available to balance out the evils committed by prosecuting her for the right number of crimes.
In many states, there is a legal claim called intentional infliction of emotional distress, which applies when someone tries to purposefully cause distress.
Three points: 1) IIED is a civil tort; not a criminal offense. That's for the family to pursue. 2) IIED claims are often VERY hard to meet the standard for, often requiring a "shocks the conscience" standard. While this case is egregious and almost certainly would meet any jurisdiction's test, going with IIED alone is a risky strategy. 3) Going with IIED alone is not always an option -- IIED is often a parasitic tort that requires some other tortious act be committed.
At any rate, point #1 kind of makes points #2-3 irrelevant. As I replied elsewhere, res judicata means that who try *everything* you can at once instead of picking and choosing the case you think would work best or else you lose the ability to try the other cases later.
I'm no lawyer, so I ask, how does unconscionability factor into this? I'm guessing you're saying the prosecutor is the one acting unconscionably, since I can hardly see the unconscionability in MySpace's actions.
Unconscionability is a legal term of art in contract law, reflecting the general unwillingness of courts to enforce unfair and one-sided contract terms. Contracts of adhesion are the type of contract most likely to trigger this doctrine because they almost always represent strongly inequitable bargaining power between the parties.
The latter article I linked just now notes that among the forms of special scrutiny that these contracts receive is...
The doctrine of unconscionability which is a fact-specific doctrine arising from equitable principles. Unconscionability in standard form contracts usually arises where there is an "absence of meaningful choice on the part of one party due to one-sided contract provisions, together with terms which are so oppressive that no reasonable person would make them and no fair and honest person would accept them." (Fanning v. Fritz's Pontiac-Cadillac-Buick Inc.)
Remedies for a breach of contract almost always involve the breaching party having to pay the difference in cost for replacing the contract with one with a new party. Ordering someone to specifically perform a certain act in accordance with a contract is rare, and criminal sanctions for breaching a contract are basically completely unheard of.
What this law would do is say the following:
A company can set terms of use for their service as they see fit. People using the service have agreed to these terms (through performance) and are subject to them. If they breach the terms, instead of demanding payment, the right to sever the contract, and/or the right to perform specific performance, the company can instead turn to the government and have the person criminally prosecuted for violating their contract.
This alone would probably trigger the doctrine of unconscionability in a fairly negotiated contract, but in a "take or leave it" EULA it's even more ridiculous.
In other words, a smart defense attorney would defend this charge on the grounds of the precedent it would set in contract law. If the law is valid, then contract would give MySpace unconscionable negotiating power -- conform to a non-negotiable contract or go to jail. Therefore, this portion of the contract is nullified and there is thus no valid and legal contract language to support the government's claim that there was an applicable access restriction.
I know this is standard practice, but this act is heinous in itself, in my opinion.
The problem is the two related doctrines of res judicata and double jeopardy. If you don't raise all possible complaints based on the same set of actions in a single suit, then you forever lose the chance to try them later. This is also often why people are allowed to plead mutually contradicting theories of events in a trial, because if they go with a single theory and lose on it, then they're precluded from bringing up the alternate theories.
The alternative to this practice is, as you might see, to drag someone repeatedly into court until one of the theories work. Naturally, this is wasteful to all parties involved, so our court system has evolved with the idea that a prosecutor or plaintiff's attorney needs to try every possible theory that might work at once.
In some situations, failure to do so may end up with you involved in a legal malpractice suit.
I don't necessarily like that they're trying this theory (because it has terrible ramifications in multiple directions if they make it), but I respect them for at least being creative in the possibilities.
We want you to be in trouble, but we can't find a law to use on you
Well, that's actually an insightful way of putting it. Anyone with any sense should know that what this woman did was absolutely horrible and unforgivable. The problem might be that the legal system may not be capable of bringing proper justice to bear against her deeds. This is a really unconventional crime in many ways, and the laws on the books may not be prepared for it. Fixing the laws after the fact doesn't solve the problem of a lack of proper justice in her case.
Again, while I don't like this particular avenue of attack, I damned well understand any prosecutor who tries to nail this witch to the post with any and every statute they have in their arsenal. That's doing your job as a prosecutor, and I *can* respect that.
That became a common position held after the war when no WMD was found. People's memories are very squishy, and I find it extremely unlikely you held this position before the war. Could you cite a single "foreign media" news source or "anti-war" page that held this position before the war? We have plenty of news archives on the web, and there is also the archive.org.
Not really. I can't find any of my own postings on the matter to back it up because, frankly, I was scared of the direction the country was taking and was self-censoring myself a lot about politics in 2002 & 2003. I wasn't sure if words were going to be used against me 10-20 years in the future at that time.
I do distinctly remember thinking when Saddam started to get desperate in his denials that he had to be bluffing. I mostly suggested this to my friends who all expressed skepticism at the idea. This was roughly, oh, a month or so before the invasion, I think.
First of all, I can't find any news source that "debunked" the Niger yellowcake reports before the war.
You're right about that part. That was just fuzzy memory. I double check the aluminum tubes thing, though, and that was starting to be debunked back in late 2002, so the seed of doubt had already been planted before the State of the Union. I remember turning to my conservative friends when we heard it on the car radio while going to eat at a restaurant and saying, "If what he said is true, then I'd support the war." I was back into skepticism mode within a week or two though.
There's a difference between skepticism of the evidence or motives vs claiming the belief that Saddam had no WMD.
I didn't feel it was certain at the time, but I felt it was more likely than not. I admit that I was deeply suspicious of the administration's motives and that severely biased my way of thinking towards innate distrust of most of what they had to say.
Like I said, I can't back it up, though, because I didn't speak out about it publicly.
I completely refuted the argument of the original poster that inspectors had come to that conclusion, citing sources and using quotes.
That's nice, but "the inspectors didn't" is a bit different from refuting the idea that a large portion of the American public did. If you meant, "no one important did," or to quibble over the meaning of "large," then maybe that's a different argument.
As sick as what she did, I don't see how faking an identity in order to harass someone until the point that they kill themselves would not be covered under like, involuntary manslaughter at the very least.
They're just doing what any good prosecutor does -- throwing everything they can at the wall to see what sticks.
That said, I think this is a real loser for the prosecution. There's no way the Supreme Court is going to let people be criminally liable for failing to obey a contract of adhesion. That's just madness. I doubt that this'll survive even at the trial level if her defense attorney hasn't forget everything about unconscionability since graduating law school years ago.
I'm sure if you took a poll among the anti-war crowd before the war, very few would have guessed the answer to what we actually found when we went in. Do you remember those times before the war? Do you disagree? How many people actually believed that he had nothing?
I can't remember when, from the State of the Union address to the start of the war itself, I firmly shifted to that position, but I know that that was where I was by the time the war started. It was becoming more and more obvious that Saddam's WMD program was an elaborate bluff, primarily targeted at Iran and Israel. We'd had the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake from Niger reports debunked. The UN inspections team was downplaying the possibility of some our claims of stockpiled materials; what WMDs they did turn up were old, poorly kept chemical munitions that the Iraqis "lost track of," which seemed to indicate that if they did have something, it was probably unusable. I remember Colin Powell's briefing to the security council be taken quite skeptically.
Before the troops landed, it was pretty obvious that the government's case for war was built at least partially on shaky intelligence. There was a sizable minority of Americans who were under the belief that the government never cared about the weapons inspections (because they were given the task of proving a negative) or diplomacy and that it was obvious the administration was looking to manufacture a causus belli.
The idea that none of us were skeptical is just wrong.
What sources are you referring to when you say: "a large portion of Americans who were listening to more than just the US administration", since virtually all the media was highly uncritical and passed on reports from the administration?
Foreign media. Most people who were cynical about the administration's motives long ago realized that the US media wasn't to be trusted to seriously contradict the President.
That's how I heard a lot about how the aluminum tubes that the administration was saying were for uranium centrifuges absolutely could not have been used for the purpose (instead before for rocket tubes). Foreign sources were also the biggest sources publishing Ambassador Wilson's logic for why Iraq wasn't getting yellowcake from Niger and were the ones who brought my attention to the fact that the "roving chemical weapons trailers" were actually for making hydrogen balloons to get artillery with. (The latter bit only came out after the war, though.)
The mainstream US media lost all credibility with me very early in the Bush administration when when went from hounding Clinton's every step to kissing Bush's ring pretty much within the span of a single year. I'm not the only person who feels that way by a long shot, and those of us who read the BBC and other foreign news were the ones who caught on pretty quickly that the causus belli was being manufactured.
Anyone sharing the URL is infringing since the URL is nothing but a decoder-ring "key" for how to get the original file back. It can't even save you any space since there's no way to encode the block numbers in a way that's shorter than the original block. This entire idea is a shell-game, and courts aren't going to be impressed by that.
I gauged wrong the improbability of having the right sized chunk. You only need 16 GiB of data to represent all possible chunks.
That makes this nothing but a fancy, 128 KiB key decoder-ring style "encryption" scheme for the data. All you're doing is saying is that A -> D (on some other system), B -> X (on some other system), etc.
You didn't actually "store" anything. You just took a 5 MiB MP3 file and replaced it with a 5 MiB URL, which is just as much a derivative work as the original file. Sorry, ZIPing or RSA encrypting an MP3 file doesn't output a noninfringing file anymore than BrightNet does.
No. The bits have no meaning. They are isolated random blocks of data, which have no meaning by themselves. Theoretically speaking, a random block of data could infringe in the same way a bunch of monkeys with type-writers might accidentally produce a text that infringes on copyright.
....Riiiiight....
As with the other respondent, you seem to have missed the fact that these "random" blocks of data are 128 KiB in size. There's only a 1 in 2 ^ 131,072 chance that a random chunk of data matches the particular one you want.
The filesystem cannot truly exist as a source of "random data" because the storage requirement for every single possible 128 KiB chunk of data are enormous....Or so I thought. I now realize, that that just requires 16 GB to cover every single possible 128 KiB chunk.
In that case, the entire network operation side of this is pointless.
It isn't a randomized block encryption. It is a storage space for random blocks of data. The random blocks of data carry no meaning and have no special significance. They are just random neutral blocks of data. What gives them meaning is the URL, which combines various blocks of random to become something with meaning.
If the blocks just exist "out there," then all you've done is encrypt the data in the URL, making the URL just as much a derivative work as an MP3 in a ZIP file. Just because you have to go through an extra step to retrieve the data doesn't make the file any less infringing, and all the information you need to do so is in the URL. All you need is your fancy BrightNet decoder ring.
(Note that the URL will always have to be at least the same size as the original file. You can't find 1 in 2^n chunks containing your n bytes of data without a n-byte key.)
So, you're right. Downloading the chunks doesn't seem all that effective of a way to deal with the copyright infringement. Instead, treating the URL as a derivative work and going after anyone who shares it is the best option.
This confuses me. P2P has substantial non infringing uses, that people don't use it that way, well you can't blame the technology or a service provider for that.
You don't understand what the courts mean by substantial. It doesn't mean that the distinct possibility exists that someone, somewhere might not be using a product for ill purposes. It means that a significant use (arguably the main use) of a product in noninfringing, like with the VCR.
Grokster was not such a product. The vast majority of traffic on Grokster was infringing material, and Grokster, Inc. encouraged the use of the product for infringement. Similarly, while this product could be used as a bizarre (and network wasteful) form of encryption (that's universally breakable by anyone using BrightNet), it's obvious declared intent is to void copyright law and to encourage infringement. There is, in fact, no use for this product (given its wasteful use of the network to download a single file in twice the number of bytes) except to avoid the law.
Judges aren't idiots. They aren't going to rule that the law is impotent in the face of some fancy shuffling method.
RIAA: Judge this scum infringed on our copyright, see we downloaded this file and part of it came from him so make him give us all of his money. Mr. Smith: Actually Judge, the piece that they downloaded from me also maps to countless other files.
Mr Smith hands a list of URLs containing a bunch of non-copyrighted files containing that piece somewhere in the URL.
Did you miss the part where the blocks are 128 KiB in size? Just how many files do you think share the same, exact 128 KiB block (especially when the blocks are likely to be divided evenly starting from byte 0)? (Considering that there are 2 ^ 131,072 possible "numbers" for each block to represent.)
I think the "preponderance of the evidence" points to civil liability.
Even if the blocks were that universal, then by downloading the URL, all you've done is download a fancily compressed version of the file. It's not like you can get away with just putting an MP3 in a ZIP file and say it's no longer infringing.
The fact is, there is no such thing as "a computer solution to a law problem".
And that's what BrightNet attempts to be.
If I'm on BrightNetP2P and upload Random Chunk "KLM" from multi-gigabyte Random Block "ABCD...XYZ", what have I done that is illegal? And how is that any different from Freenet? In both cases the uploader has complete deniability about what "KLM" is going to be used for.
You've uploaded a portion of a copyrighted work (for a purpose that isn't covered by fair use). There's your illegal act. Nothing FreeNet or BrightNet do make this more legal -- just harder to catch and prove in the case of FreeNet.
If I'm on BrightNetP2P and I download Random Chunk "KLM" from multi-gigabyte Random Block "ABCD...XYZ", what have I done that is illegal? And short of searching my computer, how are you going to prove I've infringed on anything at all? And speaking of searching computers, what part of my BrightNetP2P traffic would give you probable cause to do so?
In order:
You illegally downloaded an illegally created derivative work. You are separately liable for the derivative work and for the fully assembled file if you get that.
Simple. Download a file you own the copyright to and track which machines send you chunks.
All and none. Probable cause requires a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Since you have no possible way of determining what files are on your machine or even of preventing copyrighted files from being on your machine, suspicion is there. However, since criminal (and not civil) copyright requires willful infringement, there's no crime to have probable cause for for a warrant. On the other hand, civil discovery is another matter entirely, and your machine can be the subject of discovery. However, this is all a red herring since the data chunk might not be there anymore. The real evidence will come from downloading it from you.
The only issue with their proposed system is in distributing the URL and there are ways to robustly and anonymously do that (a Freenet-esque overlay comes to mind).
That sort of goes against the whole "open and bright" thing they have going. Basically, all they have is FreeNet - Anonymity + "Chunked" Files. They seem to think that chopping up the files makes copyright go away. It doesn't.
Maybe I'm missing something. If so, please, explain it to me. Otherwise, RTFP.
Sorry. I guess you'll have to forgive me for reading too much into the context of your post (which was a reply in a thread about "Moon v. Mars") and, like everybody else replying to you, for reading too much into the phrases "as a place to stop and 'catch our breath'" or "makes it easier to reach anywhere beyond that gravity well" which implies that you're going someplace further out -- unlike L5, which is equidistant with the Moon, and would make the idea even more a fit of madness.
I'm sorry for using critical reasoning skills and not treating your post as random blathering completely divorced from the context of the discussion. My bad, I'll try to avoid making the same mistake with your posts in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the opposite for me. I actually intended my Yahoo account to be the spam sink, and I use it for all websites that require me to give them an email address, but I never get true unsolicited spam on that account. (Just limited "newsletters" from the companies themselves that keep "forgetting" my mailing preferences.)
Gmail was the one I intend for true personal email. Even with 70-80% of spam blocked, the account was useless within a month or two. Given how little I email back and forth with people, I was getting less than 1% signal to noise ratio. I haven't checked the account in over a year now; I wonder if Google's already deleted it.
I was shocked to check a rarely-used Gmail account today and find 10K emails caught as spam and another 10K NOT caught. This is unlike Gmail. :(
This is part of why I stopped using GMail within a single month of signing up. I gave out my new email address to a handful of people, but pretty quickly after signing up, I started to get volumes of spam which were ungodly. Given security problems like the recent Calendar issue, I'm not surprised that GMail is such a spam sink -- it seems like they don't do hardly anything to protect your email address from public knowledge.
GMail is useless. I wish I could just delete my account permanently. I should probably look into doing that.
I do hope you realize that the link you made to "your" profile does nothing for any of us. I mean, did you even look at the URL to notice that there's nothing that uniquely identifies your account in it?
You came to slashdot to ask that?
Honestly. If it's truly "mind-blowing" and revolutionary, then how exactly is your average Slashdotter going to have heard of it? I mean, have you read the comments on any science article recently? What about that impressed you with the idea that people here are a good source of scientific insight?
All life on Earth benefits from even very high levels of carbon dioxide.
O RLY?
I think it is hilarious that all these environmental wacko hippies get all crazy about CO2 being emitted in excess. Do you know that there's something perfectly natural that eats up CO2? They are called p-l-a-n-t-s. That's right, the more CO2 in the air, the better plants grow.
Not necessarily. It helps in some ways and hurts in others. You've got to stop thinking in terms of first-order effects alone.
It almost seems as if this earth were designed in such a way that we couldn't mess it up.
Sorry, I just had to chuckle at that one. I'm just reminded of how if you idiot-proof something, they'll invent a better idiot.
Unfortunately for both of us, the powers that be aren't particularly interested in sacrificing now for the sake of later.
a.k.a. The voters -- especially those who are all about tax cuts.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some juvenile delinquents that I need to evict from my grass.
D0n j00 m34n j00 g0t zOMG lw4n-gn0mz0rs n00bz 2 r0x0rz?
I object to this assessment. If it wasn't illegal then justice has been served. Justice is defined as the fair application of the law--it's not always right, but it's just.
That's your idea of justice, but that's not mine. What she did was abhorrent (assuming it's as the media has reported). The lack of a law specifically condemning it does not make her walking free for it "justice." The law seeks to achieve justice; the law is not justice itself, and unjust laws may exist.
If you start saying that actions which are not illegal but are found by some set of society to be deplorable can (or, rather, *should*) be prosecutable, then you've stepped off the road of liberty. How can I be held responsible for doing things that I don't see as wrong and which no law prohibits? Must every person fear that anything not explicitly allowed by law could result in criminal prosecution because *someone* decided they did not like it? This is a direct contradiction of the constitution!
Now this is addressing a different question -- one of whether we should have rule of law. I do agree on that. That's not the question I was addressing. The real question is quite different.
(Let's put aside for a second the fact that almost anyone would condemn her acts, so this wouldn't exactly fall into the seemingly arbitrary, "*someone* decided" category that you try to paint this as.)
The real question here is, "Should the prosecutors use every law that *is* on the books and which she *is* responsible for upholding to achieve the maximum sentence when a more lax reading of criminal statutes would result in a slap on the wrist?"
I say, yes. If that means pulling out little used, obscure statutes or creative interpretation to achieve that goal, then that's still fair. After all, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Anyone with any sense knows that what she did was *wrong.* The only question here is whether there is a strong enough sentence available to balance out the evils committed by prosecuting her for the right number of crimes.
In many states, there is a legal claim called intentional infliction of emotional distress, which applies when someone tries to purposefully cause distress.
Three points:
1) IIED is a civil tort; not a criminal offense. That's for the family to pursue.
2) IIED claims are often VERY hard to meet the standard for, often requiring a "shocks the conscience" standard. While this case is egregious and almost certainly would meet any jurisdiction's test, going with IIED alone is a risky strategy.
3) Going with IIED alone is not always an option -- IIED is often a parasitic tort that requires some other tortious act be committed.
At any rate, point #1 kind of makes points #2-3 irrelevant. As I replied elsewhere, res judicata means that who try *everything* you can at once instead of picking and choosing the case you think would work best or else you lose the ability to try the other cases later.
I'm no lawyer, so I ask, how does unconscionability factor into this? I'm guessing you're saying the prosecutor is the one acting unconscionably, since I can hardly see the unconscionability in MySpace's actions.
Unconscionability is a legal term of art in contract law, reflecting the general unwillingness of courts to enforce unfair and one-sided contract terms. Contracts of adhesion are the type of contract most likely to trigger this doctrine because they almost always represent strongly inequitable bargaining power between the parties.
The latter article I linked just now notes that among the forms of special scrutiny that these contracts receive is...
The doctrine of unconscionability which is a fact-specific doctrine arising from equitable principles. Unconscionability in standard form contracts usually arises where there is an "absence of meaningful choice on the part of one party due to one-sided contract provisions, together with terms which are so oppressive that no reasonable person would make them and no fair and honest person would accept them." (Fanning v. Fritz's Pontiac-Cadillac-Buick Inc.)
Remedies for a breach of contract almost always involve the breaching party having to pay the difference in cost for replacing the contract with one with a new party. Ordering someone to specifically perform a certain act in accordance with a contract is rare, and criminal sanctions for breaching a contract are basically completely unheard of.
What this law would do is say the following:
A company can set terms of use for their service as they see fit. People using the service have agreed to these terms (through performance) and are subject to them. If they breach the terms, instead of demanding payment, the right to sever the contract, and/or the right to perform specific performance, the company can instead turn to the government and have the person criminally prosecuted for violating their contract.
This alone would probably trigger the doctrine of unconscionability in a fairly negotiated contract, but in a "take or leave it" EULA it's even more ridiculous.
In other words, a smart defense attorney would defend this charge on the grounds of the precedent it would set in contract law. If the law is valid, then contract would give MySpace unconscionable negotiating power -- conform to a non-negotiable contract or go to jail. Therefore, this portion of the contract is nullified and there is thus no valid and legal contract language to support the government's claim that there was an applicable access restriction.
I know this is standard practice, but this act is heinous in itself, in my opinion.
The problem is the two related doctrines of res judicata and double jeopardy. If you don't raise all possible complaints based on the same set of actions in a single suit, then you forever lose the chance to try them later. This is also often why people are allowed to plead mutually contradicting theories of events in a trial, because if they go with a single theory and lose on it, then they're precluded from bringing up the alternate theories.
The alternative to this practice is, as you might see, to drag someone repeatedly into court until one of the theories work. Naturally, this is wasteful to all parties involved, so our court system has evolved with the idea that a prosecutor or plaintiff's attorney needs to try every possible theory that might work at once.
In some situations, failure to do so may end up with you involved in a legal malpractice suit.
I don't necessarily like that they're trying this theory (because it has terrible ramifications in multiple directions if they make it), but I respect them for at least being creative in the possibilities.
We want you to be in trouble, but we can't find a law to use on you
Well, that's actually an insightful way of putting it. Anyone with any sense should know that what this woman did was absolutely horrible and unforgivable. The problem might be that the legal system may not be capable of bringing proper justice to bear against her deeds. This is a really unconventional crime in many ways, and the laws on the books may not be prepared for it. Fixing the laws after the fact doesn't solve the problem of a lack of proper justice in her case.
Again, while I don't like this particular avenue of attack, I damned well understand any prosecutor who tries to nail this witch to the post with any and every statute they have in their arsenal. That's doing your job as a prosecutor, and I *can* respect that.
That became a common position held after the war when no WMD was found. People's memories are very squishy, and I find it extremely unlikely you held this position before the war. Could you cite a single "foreign media" news source or "anti-war" page that held this position before the war? We have plenty of news archives on the web, and there is also the archive.org.
Not really. I can't find any of my own postings on the matter to back it up because, frankly, I was scared of the direction the country was taking and was self-censoring myself a lot about politics in 2002 & 2003. I wasn't sure if words were going to be used against me 10-20 years in the future at that time.
I do distinctly remember thinking when Saddam started to get desperate in his denials that he had to be bluffing. I mostly suggested this to my friends who all expressed skepticism at the idea. This was roughly, oh, a month or so before the invasion, I think.
First of all, I can't find any news source that "debunked" the Niger yellowcake reports before the war.
You're right about that part. That was just fuzzy memory. I double check the aluminum tubes thing, though, and that was starting to be debunked back in late 2002, so the seed of doubt had already been planted before the State of the Union. I remember turning to my conservative friends when we heard it on the car radio while going to eat at a restaurant and saying, "If what he said is true, then I'd support the war." I was back into skepticism mode within a week or two though.
There's a difference between skepticism of the evidence or motives vs claiming the belief that Saddam had no WMD.
I didn't feel it was certain at the time, but I felt it was more likely than not. I admit that I was deeply suspicious of the administration's motives and that severely biased my way of thinking towards innate distrust of most of what they had to say.
Like I said, I can't back it up, though, because I didn't speak out about it publicly.
I completely refuted the argument of the original poster that inspectors had come to that conclusion, citing sources and using quotes.
That's nice, but "the inspectors didn't" is a bit different from refuting the idea that a large portion of the American public did. If you meant, "no one important did," or to quibble over the meaning of "large," then maybe that's a different argument.
As sick as what she did, I don't see how faking an identity in order to harass someone until the point that they kill themselves would not be covered under like, involuntary manslaughter at the very least.
They're just doing what any good prosecutor does -- throwing everything they can at the wall to see what sticks.
That said, I think this is a real loser for the prosecution. There's no way the Supreme Court is going to let people be criminally liable for failing to obey a contract of adhesion. That's just madness. I doubt that this'll survive even at the trial level if her defense attorney hasn't forget everything about unconscionability since graduating law school years ago.
I'm sure if you took a poll among the anti-war crowd before the war, very few would have guessed the answer to what we actually found when we went in. Do you remember those times before the war? Do you disagree? How many people actually believed that he had nothing?
I can't remember when, from the State of the Union address to the start of the war itself, I firmly shifted to that position, but I know that that was where I was by the time the war started. It was becoming more and more obvious that Saddam's WMD program was an elaborate bluff, primarily targeted at Iran and Israel. We'd had the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake from Niger reports debunked. The UN inspections team was downplaying the possibility of some our claims of stockpiled materials; what WMDs they did turn up were old, poorly kept chemical munitions that the Iraqis "lost track of," which seemed to indicate that if they did have something, it was probably unusable. I remember Colin Powell's briefing to the security council be taken quite skeptically.
Before the troops landed, it was pretty obvious that the government's case for war was built at least partially on shaky intelligence. There was a sizable minority of Americans who were under the belief that the government never cared about the weapons inspections (because they were given the task of proving a negative) or diplomacy and that it was obvious the administration was looking to manufacture a causus belli.
The idea that none of us were skeptical is just wrong.
Gah, that was a terribly written post. My apologies about the grammar. I guess I'm groggier than I thought.
I meant to say, "(instead *of* for rocket tubes)," and "making hydrogen balloons for artillery target practice." Sorry for the unintelligible post.
What sources are you referring to when you say: "a large portion of Americans who were listening to more than just the US administration", since virtually all the media was highly uncritical and passed on reports from the administration?
Foreign media. Most people who were cynical about the administration's motives long ago realized that the US media wasn't to be trusted to seriously contradict the President.
That's how I heard a lot about how the aluminum tubes that the administration was saying were for uranium centrifuges absolutely could not have been used for the purpose (instead before for rocket tubes). Foreign sources were also the biggest sources publishing Ambassador Wilson's logic for why Iraq wasn't getting yellowcake from Niger and were the ones who brought my attention to the fact that the "roving chemical weapons trailers" were actually for making hydrogen balloons to get artillery with. (The latter bit only came out after the war, though.)
The mainstream US media lost all credibility with me very early in the Bush administration when when went from hounding Clinton's every step to kissing Bush's ring pretty much within the span of a single year. I'm not the only person who feels that way by a long shot, and those of us who read the BBC and other foreign news were the ones who caught on pretty quickly that the causus belli was being manufactured.
Since this is an article with somebody complaining, that would seem to be prima facie evidence that it's still the same ol' web.
That used to be Usenet. The web was where content lived.
I'm 50 and I don't watch TV at all...
Given your mastery of statistics, I'm surprised.
Anyone sharing the URL is infringing since the URL is nothing but a decoder-ring "key" for how to get the original file back. It can't even save you any space since there's no way to encode the block numbers in a way that's shorter than the original block. This entire idea is a shell-game, and courts aren't going to be impressed by that.
I gauged wrong the improbability of having the right sized chunk. You only need 16 GiB of data to represent all possible chunks.
That makes this nothing but a fancy, 128 KiB key decoder-ring style "encryption" scheme for the data. All you're doing is saying is that A -> D (on some other system), B -> X (on some other system), etc.
You didn't actually "store" anything. You just took a 5 MiB MP3 file and replaced it with a 5 MiB URL, which is just as much a derivative work as the original file. Sorry, ZIPing or RSA encrypting an MP3 file doesn't output a noninfringing file anymore than BrightNet does.
No. The bits have no meaning. They are isolated random blocks of data, which have no meaning by themselves. Theoretically speaking, a random block of data could infringe in the same way a bunch of monkeys with type-writers might accidentally produce a text that infringes on copyright.
....Riiiiight....
As with the other respondent, you seem to have missed the fact that these "random" blocks of data are 128 KiB in size. There's only a 1 in 2 ^ 131,072 chance that a random chunk of data matches the particular one you want.
The filesystem cannot truly exist as a source of "random data" because the storage requirement for every single possible 128 KiB chunk of data are enormous. ...Or so I thought. I now realize, that that just requires 16 GB to cover every single possible 128 KiB chunk.
In that case, the entire network operation side of this is pointless.
It isn't a randomized block encryption. It is a storage space for random blocks of data. The random blocks of data carry no meaning and have no special significance. They are just random neutral blocks of data. What gives them meaning is the URL, which combines various blocks of random to become something with meaning.
If the blocks just exist "out there," then all you've done is encrypt the data in the URL, making the URL just as much a derivative work as an MP3 in a ZIP file. Just because you have to go through an extra step to retrieve the data doesn't make the file any less infringing, and all the information you need to do so is in the URL. All you need is your fancy BrightNet decoder ring.
(Note that the URL will always have to be at least the same size as the original file. You can't find 1 in 2^n chunks containing your n bytes of data without a n-byte key.)
So, you're right. Downloading the chunks doesn't seem all that effective of a way to deal with the copyright infringement. Instead, treating the URL as a derivative work and going after anyone who shares it is the best option.
This confuses me. P2P has substantial non infringing uses, that people don't use it that way, well you can't blame the technology or a service provider for that.
You don't understand what the courts mean by substantial. It doesn't mean that the distinct possibility exists that someone, somewhere might not be using a product for ill purposes. It means that a significant use (arguably the main use) of a product in noninfringing, like with the VCR.
Grokster was not such a product. The vast majority of traffic on Grokster was infringing material, and Grokster, Inc. encouraged the use of the product for infringement. Similarly, while this product could be used as a bizarre (and network wasteful) form of encryption (that's universally breakable by anyone using BrightNet), it's obvious declared intent is to void copyright law and to encourage infringement. There is, in fact, no use for this product (given its wasteful use of the network to download a single file in twice the number of bytes) except to avoid the law.
Judges aren't idiots. They aren't going to rule that the law is impotent in the face of some fancy shuffling method.
RIAA: Judge this scum infringed on our copyright, see we downloaded this file and part of it came from him so make him give us all of his money.
Mr. Smith: Actually Judge, the piece that they downloaded from me also maps to countless other files.
Mr Smith hands a list of URLs containing a bunch of non-copyrighted files containing that piece somewhere in the URL.
Did you miss the part where the blocks are 128 KiB in size? Just how many files do you think share the same, exact 128 KiB block (especially when the blocks are likely to be divided evenly starting from byte 0)? (Considering that there are 2 ^ 131,072 possible "numbers" for each block to represent.)
I think the "preponderance of the evidence" points to civil liability.
Even if the blocks were that universal, then by downloading the URL, all you've done is download a fancily compressed version of the file. It's not like you can get away with just putting an MP3 in a ZIP file and say it's no longer infringing.
The fact is, there is no such thing as "a computer solution to a law problem".
And that's what BrightNet attempts to be.
If I'm on BrightNetP2P and upload Random Chunk "KLM" from multi-gigabyte Random Block "ABCD...XYZ", what have I done that is illegal? And how is that any different from Freenet? In both cases the uploader has complete deniability about what "KLM" is going to be used for.
You've uploaded a portion of a copyrighted work (for a purpose that isn't covered by fair use). There's your illegal act. Nothing FreeNet or BrightNet do make this more legal -- just harder to catch and prove in the case of FreeNet.
If I'm on BrightNetP2P and I download Random Chunk "KLM" from multi-gigabyte Random Block "ABCD...XYZ", what have I done that is illegal? And short of searching my computer, how are you going to prove I've infringed on anything at all? And speaking of searching computers, what part of my BrightNetP2P traffic would give you probable cause to do so?
In order:
However, this is all a red herring since the data chunk might not be there anymore. The real evidence will come from downloading it from you.
The only issue with their proposed system is in distributing the URL and there are ways to robustly and anonymously do that (a Freenet-esque overlay comes to mind).
That sort of goes against the whole "open and bright" thing they have going. Basically, all they have is FreeNet - Anonymity + "Chunked" Files. They seem to think that chopping up the files makes copyright go away. It doesn't.
Maybe I'm missing something. If so, please, explain it to me. Otherwise, RTFP.
Sorry. I guess you'll have to forgive me for reading too much into the context of your post (which was a reply in a thread about "Moon v. Mars") and, like everybody else replying to you, for reading too much into the phrases "as a place to stop and 'catch our breath'" or "makes it easier to reach anywhere beyond that gravity well" which implies that you're going someplace further out -- unlike L5, which is equidistant with the Moon, and would make the idea even more a fit of madness.
I'm sorry for using critical reasoning skills and not treating your post as random blathering completely divorced from the context of the discussion. My bad, I'll try to avoid making the same mistake with your posts in the future.