I think that those are perfectly innovative. But that's not enough.
The purpose of the patent system is to encourage the creation, disclosure, and use of novel, nonobvious inventions which would otherwise not be created, disclosed, and used. It is not a reward, it is an enticement to produce these three beneficial results.
In the process there is a small dimunition of these three goods -- where there is a patent, the invention cannot be freely used, and while this might encourage others to 'invent around' the patent, it also tends to discourage productive yet unauthorized work in improving the patent itself (although that too is somewhat countered by the availability of patents on the improvements). Normally these minor harms are significantly outweighed by the good of the patent system.
However, I think that two fields, software and business methods, are special cases. In both fields, there are tremendous encouragements towards creation and use of novel, nonobvious inventions regardless of patents. Typically, these inventions are straightforward enough, or are disclosed for other reasons, such that the goal of disclosure is generally also well-satisfied. I do not think that offering patents in these fields will actually produce any further benefits to the public. These fields would most likely be just as dynamic, and with all the same inventions if no patents were issued.
Where a patent cannot provide any real encouragement, there is no reason to issue it. Furthermore, there is no good from a patent in these fields that outweighs the bad that inevitably results from patents. This is an unusual situation, but I think that because of it, we should not grant patents in these fields until they 'slow down' to the point where a patent would actually provide otherwise-unrealized benefits greater than the harm produced by the same.
So sure, they're perfectly good inventions. But are patents necessary so as to get these inventions? I think not.
No there doesn't. People work without reward all the time. Look at Gigli. Very very few authors actually make enough from their works to even support themselves, much less to get anything of value.
What you ought to have said was that people often hope to have a reward for their creative works; not just any reward, in fact, but a large enough one to outweigh their best alternative.
That's fine, but remember that just as an author should weigh their best alternative against a hoped-for reward (e.g. author X can write a book or become an accountant, and should choose whatever is most likely to yield the most money), so too should the public engage in a similar calculus. If the copyright laws necessary for an author to create a particular work are very onerous, the harm caused by these laws may outweigh any benefit we gain from the work itself being created. The public not only must attempt to provide authors with the least reward for the most output (just as authors try to get the most reward for the least output -- both are self-interested) but we must be willing to accept that some works are not worth the reward it would take for them to be created.
I for one would rather have sensible copyright laws than the next Harry Potter book, if that's what it boiled down to.
LOL. In fact, courts don't care how much new material there might be in an infringing work, they only care about the part that is infringing, even if it were only one hundreth of a percent of the new work. Adding lots of stuff is irrelevant; taking lots of stuff is where you get in trouble.
Well, you can trademark the name of a game. You can patent the rules of a game (if they qualify for a patent; many will not be novel or nonobvious enough). And you can copyright a specific expression of the rules (provided it doesn't protect the underlying rules or other expressions of the rules), the art on the box, the art on the board (to the extent it's not functional for game playing purposes), the shape of the pieces (ditto), etc.
So looking similar may or may not be a stumbling block, but generally you're right; it's easy to make knock-off games since the rules by which the game functions are not copyrightable.
Well, from a little googling (I'm too lazy to formally shepardize things for the purpose of/. posts) it appears that at least one court in FL has found that statute unconstitutional. Given the age of the statute, I'm unsurprised that it wouldn't withstand the modern caselaw.
They're talking about stuff that, for example, incites racial violence, specifically. If you start dispensing stuff that says, for example, "The Jews are responsible for 9/11!" most states will require that you attatch your name and/or address to it.
That's news to me. Can you cite some examples?
"Imminent threat" means "Kill everybody on this list of abortionists."
Eh, following Brandenburg, it means that the speech in question has to be directed towards inciting or producing imminent lawless action and has to be likely to actually do so. Thus, if it's not intended to get people to break the law, it's lawful; if people are not likely to do it imminently (because they're not likely to do it at all, or at least not for a while), it's lawful. So you example could work, but it depends on the context.
However, it does not give them the right to restrict discussion about patents or copyrights.
First, they aren't restricting discussion. Second, you've changed your example. Before you said they were restrict[ing] what can or cannot be done to bits contained on a disk owned by a researcher?
There is a difference between speech -- such as talking about a copyright (and, btw, I think you mean talking about the access controls applied to a copyrighted work, which is a different thing) -- and conduct -- such as actually circumventing an access control, as opposed to just talking about it. The speech/conduct dichotomy is fairly important, and you might want to take a look at some cases that get into it in a 1st Amendment context, such as US v. O'Brien.
Copyright law is all about conduct, even though it is conduct that is very closely tied to speech. One infringes a copyright when one reproduces a copy of a copyrighted work without permission or an applicable exemption. This act of reproduction is conduct, even though it is conduct that produces some speech. It would destroy copyright if you could always avoid liability for infringement on the basis of the 1st Amendment owing to the speech aspect of the infringing act. The courts don't believe that that's a sensible interpretation of the Constitution, given that we have a long history of having both a vital 1st Amendment and copyright laws, and honestly, I think they're right. There are major problems with our current laws, but they should be dealt with directly, as they can be fixed. Your tactic would wreck the entire system, and probably not be all that helpful overall.
Incidentally, your Ford example is a flop -- a patent is a much broader right than merely being able to manufacture articles which embody patented inventions, and there is no personal use exemption for patents.
With regards to your non sequitur attack on agencies, you should probably read US v. Grimaud, and bear in mind that the same sorts of concepts are just as applicable and even more important for executive agencies. In any event, getting rid of agencies would be far more difficult than reforming copyright law, is of much more dubious value, and would probably severely hurt the country, as there is simply too much work to be done for as miniscule a federal government as you imagine.
Presumably, they have the power from Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (or according to some, Clause 3, though I disagree with that). As for rights, having them isn't the same as having them guaranteed. Furthermore, provided that due process (see the 5th Amendment, since we're discussing the federal government here) is satisfied, you can be deprived of that right. Of course, the current stance of the courts is that copyright doesn't infringe on the rights of the people to begin with, but rather works in cooperation with it. Again, not something I agree with, but that's how it's working out these days.
As perhaps the most obvious example, I defy you to find anything in there which even remotely resembles a right to abortion, yet the SC found it constitutional.
Actually, what the Court found was not that abortion is constitutional, which everyone already knew, but that banning it is not always constitutional.
In any case, abortion is merely within the subset of the constitutional right to privacy, much in the same way that freedom of speech and press encompass speech on the Internet, as well as more traditional forms of speech and so on. The framers couldn't and didn't imagine how life would change hundreds of years later, but we can quite easily understand the broad ideas they set forth and work out how to apply them reasonably to the modern world. We don't have to pretend that we still live in the late 18th century.
That the Constitution doesn't explicitly mention a general privacy right is not a big deal. The 9th Amendment itself warns us that there are many rights which are not listed in that document, but which still exist. Given that the overarching theme of the Bill of Rights and a couple of later amendments is that of government noninterference in people's lives, and given the broad protections of liberties generally in the due process clauses, and that there are unenumerated rights, it's not difficult to find that the government should not interfere in people's private lives unduly. For example, barring a really good reason, the government cannot prevent people from using contraception, or engaging in consensual sex. Private medical decisions undertaken with one's doctor -- which includes abortion -- is another part of people's lives that must not be intruded upon without a good enough reason.
Generally, it's akin to how the right to free speech doesn't explicitly include a right for people to choose to listen to you, but how we know that right must surely exist and be equally protected, lest the right to free speech be made moot.
You might want to read about what the Court actually decided, and some of the cases that led up to it, before badmouthing it.
And incidentally, despite the fact that the media keeps saying the tortious action was "downloading", the actual tortious action by statute was *uploading*.
Actually the statute considers reproduction to be infringing, regardless of which direction you do it in. And courts have found both uploading and downloading to be infringing.
In the American judicial system, the point is not to prove one's innocence, but rather, that the complaining party must prove the defendant's guilt. Hence why jury verdicts are read as "(not) guilty" and never "innocent".
Setting aside that it's a bit odd to think of there just being one American judicial system, a discussion of guilt or innocence is pointless here. This is not a criminal trial, it is a civil trial. The issue is whether the defendant is liable or not, and there are some important differences between criminal and civil trials.
The system cares if it can be proved beyond a reasonable dobut that you did it.
For example, in a civil action, the beyond a reasonable doubt standard does not apply. Instead, the typical standard is the far lower preponderance of the evidence standard, which is a simple weighing of probability, i.e. if there is a 51% chance that you did it, then it's a fact.
Furthermore, I think this whole push by RIAA / MPAA to describe filesharing as stealing is exactly the kind of metaphorical talk that's designed to prime the minds of policy makers to react to these transgressions in a certain sort of way. If it was just described as copying (which, by any account, illegal or quasi-legal duplication of these sorts of copyrighted media is), there isn't nearly the feeling of loss or mistreatement to the party that controls the source work.
True, although you probably don't have to be all that cunning to figure that out.
Something which has fair-market valuation
In the typical copyright infringement case against Joe Downloader, valuation isn't a factor. The plaintiff will opt for statutory damages, which are more or less large arbitrary values unrelated to the actual harm done. For example, let's say that you infringe a copyright by downloading a movie that's out on DVD. While the loss to the plaintiff might be a mere $20 or so, the least you're going to end up paying is $700, and it could easily go as high as $150,000.
So? If this were a criminal suit prosecuted by the federal government, that would mean something.
In a civil suit brought by a plaintiff such as the RIAA, it doesn't mean crap. This is because in such a civil suit, the plaintiff does not have to prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt. They only have to prove it by a preponderance of the evidence. That is, that it is more likely than not, that it was the defendant. Or in numberical terms, that there was a 51% likelihood that the person they're suing actually did it. Even if the defendant can create a reasonable doubt, he will still lose, because that's not good enough.
That's not really how this works. All they have to show is that it is more likely that it was you than it was someone else. That is, there only has to be a 51% chance that it was you. Just because it's plausible that it was someone else doesn't get you off the hook.
This is because in a typical civil copyright suit, the standard of proof is that of a preponderance of the evidence. It is not the much higher standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, as typically used in criminal trials prosecuted by the government.
The Supreme Court doesn't make up constitutional law, it reads what's already there. Myself, I never said anything with regards to the OP, I only pointed out that the incorporation doctrine exists.
Of course, even at the highest levels, there have been those who read the protections of the 1st Amendment literally, while also recognizing that it's incorporated as to the states.
No where does it say that the states shall not abridge the freedom of speech.
That's because it incorporates virtually the entire Bill of Rights, not just one part of one amendment.
When it limits the states it specifically restricts itself to privileges and immunities
No. Despite your overly-large quote, you seem to have stopped reading early. The relevant clause is the due process clause:
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
This now brings us to the Gitlow case (one of many free speech cases from the red scare in the early 20th century), since we're discussing free speech and the incorporation doctrine. In that case, the Supreme Court said:
For present purposes we may and do assume that freedom of speech and of the press-which are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congress-are among the fundamental personal rights and 'liberties' protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the States.
This means that the rights guaranteed in the First Amendment are part of the group of liberties which states may not deprive people of without due process. The substantive and procedural due process requirements are the same whether the government in question is that of the United States or of one of the states. The end result is that the states are just as bound by the First Amendment as the federal government is.
minors aren't full citizens of the united states, ask any attorney.
Actually, they are.
Nothing in the constitution says anything about giving gaming rights to people that are not citizens of the United States.
The Constitution guarantees rights, it doesn't grant them. And at any rate, the 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments protect the rights of all people in the United States to play video games.
making a law which makes it illegal to sell games (of any type, violent or not) to minors is not a violation of anyone's first amendment rights.
Possibly, however, the 1st amendment right of game developers to communicate with minors, and the 1st amendment right of minors to listen, are both implicated. Perhaps these rights are not infringed upon by the law, but it's not a given.
That could do it. Usually though, you get disbarred if you steal money from clients. It's a pretty serious punishment, so it isn't used lightly. Off the top of my head, it's kind of similar to getting banned from baseball. It totally ends your career, and tends to make it difficult to start from scratch elsewhere.
So what? We're discussing whether it's legal for people in the US, where title 17 is the law, can download from them. We are not discussing events that are taking place in Russia; only the parts that occur here in America.
Slashdot Mirror
There are way too many lawyers in the USA.
Are you kidding? The US has a dangerously small number of lawyers. We need more; many more.
Meh. That job has higher turnover (and is only a little bit safer) than being the drummer for Spinal Tap.
I think that those are perfectly innovative. But that's not enough.
The purpose of the patent system is to encourage the creation, disclosure, and use of novel, nonobvious inventions which would otherwise not be created, disclosed, and used. It is not a reward, it is an enticement to produce these three beneficial results.
In the process there is a small dimunition of these three goods -- where there is a patent, the invention cannot be freely used, and while this might encourage others to 'invent around' the patent, it also tends to discourage productive yet unauthorized work in improving the patent itself (although that too is somewhat countered by the availability of patents on the improvements). Normally these minor harms are significantly outweighed by the good of the patent system.
However, I think that two fields, software and business methods, are special cases. In both fields, there are tremendous encouragements towards creation and use of novel, nonobvious inventions regardless of patents. Typically, these inventions are straightforward enough, or are disclosed for other reasons, such that the goal of disclosure is generally also well-satisfied. I do not think that offering patents in these fields will actually produce any further benefits to the public. These fields would most likely be just as dynamic, and with all the same inventions if no patents were issued.
Where a patent cannot provide any real encouragement, there is no reason to issue it. Furthermore, there is no good from a patent in these fields that outweighs the bad that inevitably results from patents. This is an unusual situation, but I think that because of it, we should not grant patents in these fields until they 'slow down' to the point where a patent would actually provide otherwise-unrealized benefits greater than the harm produced by the same.
So sure, they're perfectly good inventions. But are patents necessary so as to get these inventions? I think not.
No there doesn't. People work without reward all the time. Look at Gigli. Very very few authors actually make enough from their works to even support themselves, much less to get anything of value.
What you ought to have said was that people often hope to have a reward for their creative works; not just any reward, in fact, but a large enough one to outweigh their best alternative.
That's fine, but remember that just as an author should weigh their best alternative against a hoped-for reward (e.g. author X can write a book or become an accountant, and should choose whatever is most likely to yield the most money), so too should the public engage in a similar calculus. If the copyright laws necessary for an author to create a particular work are very onerous, the harm caused by these laws may outweigh any benefit we gain from the work itself being created. The public not only must attempt to provide authors with the least reward for the most output (just as authors try to get the most reward for the least output -- both are self-interested) but we must be willing to accept that some works are not worth the reward it would take for them to be created.
I for one would rather have sensible copyright laws than the next Harry Potter book, if that's what it boiled down to.
LOL. In fact, courts don't care how much new material there might be in an infringing work, they only care about the part that is infringing, even if it were only one hundreth of a percent of the new work. Adding lots of stuff is irrelevant; taking lots of stuff is where you get in trouble.
Well, you can trademark the name of a game. You can patent the rules of a game (if they qualify for a patent; many will not be novel or nonobvious enough). And you can copyright a specific expression of the rules (provided it doesn't protect the underlying rules or other expressions of the rules), the art on the box, the art on the board (to the extent it's not functional for game playing purposes), the shape of the pieces (ditto), etc.
So looking similar may or may not be a stumbling block, but generally you're right; it's easy to make knock-off games since the rules by which the game functions are not copyrightable.
Well, from a little googling (I'm too lazy to formally shepardize things for the purpose of /. posts) it appears that at least one court in FL has found that statute unconstitutional. Given the age of the statute, I'm unsurprised that it wouldn't withstand the modern caselaw.
They're talking about stuff that, for example, incites racial violence, specifically. If you start dispensing stuff that says, for example, "The Jews are responsible for 9/11!" most states will require that you attatch your name and/or address to it.
That's news to me. Can you cite some examples?
"Imminent threat" means "Kill everybody on this list of abortionists."
Eh, following Brandenburg, it means that the speech in question has to be directed towards inciting or producing imminent lawless action and has to be likely to actually do so. Thus, if it's not intended to get people to break the law, it's lawful; if people are not likely to do it imminently (because they're not likely to do it at all, or at least not for a while), it's lawful. So you example could work, but it depends on the context.
However, it does not give them the right to restrict discussion about patents or copyrights.
First, they aren't restricting discussion. Second, you've changed your example. Before you said they were restrict[ing] what can or cannot be done to bits contained on a disk owned by a researcher?
There is a difference between speech -- such as talking about a copyright (and, btw, I think you mean talking about the access controls applied to a copyrighted work, which is a different thing) -- and conduct -- such as actually circumventing an access control, as opposed to just talking about it. The speech/conduct dichotomy is fairly important, and you might want to take a look at some cases that get into it in a 1st Amendment context, such as US v. O'Brien.
Copyright law is all about conduct, even though it is conduct that is very closely tied to speech. One infringes a copyright when one reproduces a copy of a copyrighted work without permission or an applicable exemption. This act of reproduction is conduct, even though it is conduct that produces some speech. It would destroy copyright if you could always avoid liability for infringement on the basis of the 1st Amendment owing to the speech aspect of the infringing act. The courts don't believe that that's a sensible interpretation of the Constitution, given that we have a long history of having both a vital 1st Amendment and copyright laws, and honestly, I think they're right. There are major problems with our current laws, but they should be dealt with directly, as they can be fixed. Your tactic would wreck the entire system, and probably not be all that helpful overall.
Incidentally, your Ford example is a flop -- a patent is a much broader right than merely being able to manufacture articles which embody patented inventions, and there is no personal use exemption for patents.
With regards to your non sequitur attack on agencies, you should probably read US v. Grimaud, and bear in mind that the same sorts of concepts are just as applicable and even more important for executive agencies. In any event, getting rid of agencies would be far more difficult than reforming copyright law, is of much more dubious value, and would probably severely hurt the country, as there is simply too much work to be done for as miniscule a federal government as you imagine.
Presumably, they have the power from Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (or according to some, Clause 3, though I disagree with that). As for rights, having them isn't the same as having them guaranteed. Furthermore, provided that due process (see the 5th Amendment, since we're discussing the federal government here) is satisfied, you can be deprived of that right. Of course, the current stance of the courts is that copyright doesn't infringe on the rights of the people to begin with, but rather works in cooperation with it. Again, not something I agree with, but that's how it's working out these days.
As perhaps the most obvious example, I defy you to find anything in there which even remotely resembles a right to abortion, yet the SC found it constitutional.
Actually, what the Court found was not that abortion is constitutional, which everyone already knew, but that banning it is not always constitutional.
In any case, abortion is merely within the subset of the constitutional right to privacy, much in the same way that freedom of speech and press encompass speech on the Internet, as well as more traditional forms of speech and so on. The framers couldn't and didn't imagine how life would change hundreds of years later, but we can quite easily understand the broad ideas they set forth and work out how to apply them reasonably to the modern world. We don't have to pretend that we still live in the late 18th century.
That the Constitution doesn't explicitly mention a general privacy right is not a big deal. The 9th Amendment itself warns us that there are many rights which are not listed in that document, but which still exist. Given that the overarching theme of the Bill of Rights and a couple of later amendments is that of government noninterference in people's lives, and given the broad protections of liberties generally in the due process clauses, and that there are unenumerated rights, it's not difficult to find that the government should not interfere in people's private lives unduly. For example, barring a really good reason, the government cannot prevent people from using contraception, or engaging in consensual sex. Private medical decisions undertaken with one's doctor -- which includes abortion -- is another part of people's lives that must not be intruded upon without a good enough reason.
Generally, it's akin to how the right to free speech doesn't explicitly include a right for people to choose to listen to you, but how we know that right must surely exist and be equally protected, lest the right to free speech be made moot.
You might want to read about what the Court actually decided, and some of the cases that led up to it, before badmouthing it.
And incidentally, despite the fact that the media keeps saying the tortious action was "downloading", the actual tortious action by statute was *uploading*.
Actually the statute considers reproduction to be infringing, regardless of which direction you do it in. And courts have found both uploading and downloading to be infringing.
Sure there is at least one lawyer hangs out here
Seems unlikely to me.
I'm not a lawyer
I am!
In the American judicial system, the point is not to prove one's innocence, but rather, that the complaining party must prove the defendant's guilt. Hence why jury verdicts are read as "(not) guilty" and never "innocent".
Setting aside that it's a bit odd to think of there just being one American judicial system, a discussion of guilt or innocence is pointless here. This is not a criminal trial, it is a civil trial. The issue is whether the defendant is liable or not, and there are some important differences between criminal and civil trials.
The system cares if it can be proved beyond a reasonable dobut that you did it.
For example, in a civil action, the beyond a reasonable doubt standard does not apply. Instead, the typical standard is the far lower preponderance of the evidence standard, which is a simple weighing of probability, i.e. if there is a 51% chance that you did it, then it's a fact.
Furthermore, I think this whole push by RIAA / MPAA to describe filesharing as stealing is exactly the kind of metaphorical talk that's designed to prime the minds of policy makers to react to these transgressions in a certain sort of way. If it was just described as copying (which, by any account, illegal or quasi-legal duplication of these sorts of copyrighted media is), there isn't nearly the feeling of loss or mistreatement to the party that controls the source work.
True, although you probably don't have to be all that cunning to figure that out.
Something which has fair-market valuation
In the typical copyright infringement case against Joe Downloader, valuation isn't a factor. The plaintiff will opt for statutory damages, which are more or less large arbitrary values unrelated to the actual harm done. For example, let's say that you infringe a copyright by downloading a movie that's out on DVD. While the loss to the plaintiff might be a mere $20 or so, the least you're going to end up paying is $700, and it could easily go as high as $150,000.
It's enough to create reasonable doubt.
So? If this were a criminal suit prosecuted by the federal government, that would mean something.
In a civil suit brought by a plaintiff such as the RIAA, it doesn't mean crap. This is because in such a civil suit, the plaintiff does not have to prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt. They only have to prove it by a preponderance of the evidence. That is, that it is more likely than not, that it was the defendant. Or in numberical terms, that there was a 51% likelihood that the person they're suing actually did it. Even if the defendant can create a reasonable doubt, he will still lose, because that's not good enough.
Plausible denyabilty.
That's not really how this works. All they have to show is that it is more likely that it was you than it was someone else. That is, there only has to be a 51% chance that it was you. Just because it's plausible that it was someone else doesn't get you off the hook.
This is because in a typical civil copyright suit, the standard of proof is that of a preponderance of the evidence. It is not the much higher standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, as typically used in criminal trials prosecuted by the government.
The Supreme Court doesn't make up constitutional law, it reads what's already there. Myself, I never said anything with regards to the OP, I only pointed out that the incorporation doctrine exists.
Of course, even at the highest levels, there have been those who read the protections of the 1st Amendment literally, while also recognizing that it's incorporated as to the states.
That's because it incorporates virtually the entire Bill of Rights, not just one part of one amendment.
When it limits the states it specifically restricts itself to privileges and immunities
No. Despite your overly-large quote, you seem to have stopped reading early. The relevant clause is the due process clause:
This now brings us to the Gitlow case (one of many free speech cases from the red scare in the early 20th century), since we're discussing free speech and the incorporation doctrine. In that case, the Supreme Court said:
This means that the rights guaranteed in the First Amendment are part of the group of liberties which states may not deprive people of without due process. The substantive and procedural due process requirements are the same whether the government in question is that of the United States or of one of the states. The end result is that the states are just as bound by the First Amendment as the federal government is.
Note that the first amendment specifies congress specifically
And is made applicable to the several states via the 14th Amendment. And most states have similar guarantees of rights in their own constitutions.
But then again if we were to send the lawyers to the salt mines, I think it would solve most of our problems...
I disagree. I think that it would just cause more problems.
When's the last time a code name was also used for the retail product?
Such as Lisa, Macintosh, Newton, or Pippin?
minors aren't full citizens of the united states, ask any attorney.
Actually, they are.
Nothing in the constitution says anything about giving gaming rights to people that are not citizens of the United States.
The Constitution guarantees rights, it doesn't grant them. And at any rate, the 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments protect the rights of all people in the United States to play video games.
making a law which makes it illegal to sell games (of any type, violent or not) to minors is not a violation of anyone's first amendment rights.
Possibly, however, the 1st amendment right of game developers to communicate with minors, and the 1st amendment right of minors to listen, are both implicated. Perhaps these rights are not infringed upon by the law, but it's not a given.
That could do it. Usually though, you get disbarred if you steal money from clients. It's a pretty serious punishment, so it isn't used lightly. Off the top of my head, it's kind of similar to getting banned from baseball. It totally ends your career, and tends to make it difficult to start from scratch elsewhere.
Nah, not likely. A suspension _maybe_, but AFAIK he hasn't done anything serious enough to warrant losing his license permanently.
So what? We're discussing whether it's legal for people in the US, where title 17 is the law, can download from them. We are not discussing events that are taking place in Russia; only the parts that occur here in America.