This is probably aimed at counterfeiters who produce fake disks by the truckload. And I don't have a problem with shutting *them* down.
But MOST businesses (legit or otherwise) rent, they don't own the building they're working out of. If the property in question was so used without its owner's knowledge, this is likely to produce a number of mortgage and tax defaults as owners whose commercial property cannot produce income for the next year find it more cost-effective to simply stop paying for it.
That aside, I'm wondering what impact this might have on private residences (both owner-occupant and rentals) if the tenant is convicted of filesharing. Does their concept go this far? Do proposed or existing laws address this?
What about selling them the domains now? if you don't plan to keep them, you might get something from these jerks for wasting your time. You might ask your lawyers about that.
Of course, if you just let them expire, chances are they'll be snapped up by some squatter, and then they'll never get 'em;)
Making sure the defendant won't have time to respond is an old and oft-used trick. I would guess that's what happened here -- the letters were *deliberately* underpostaged, so that in no case would the defendant have the full two weeks to decide what to do. Whether this is still a binding letter probably varies by jurisdiction. In some areas, merely a "reasonable attempt to notify" is required, NOT an actual delivery.
A similar trick I've personally seen used for a sheriff's sale, where a member of that sheriff's department wanted to ensure that he would be the only bidder present, and that the owner would be unable to redeem his property: Legal notice of sale has to be posted in a public place. So... the legal notice was posted on a building at the fairgrounds. Which are technically "public" but in fact were locked and inaccessable for the whole notification period.
Those poor crew members are paid by the hour right up front, NOT via royalties. And they make damned good money. Most of 'em are union too (AFL-CIO, if I remember right), making union wages and union overtime and union benefits if they're laid off.
When I was working in the biz, some 20 years ago, one of the set truckers showed me his paystub. $30/hour for 8 hours plus 4 hours/day of overtime (2 at time and a half, 2 at double time), of which he actually worked two hours; the rest of the day he sat on his ass, but since he couldn't leave, he still got paid for his time. With overtime, his gross paycheck was $450 PER DAY.
And people wonder why Hollywood can claim that movies make no money... even when that's pure BS, they can still haul out numbers like these to show how much it cost them.
Occurs to me that a search engine is fundamentally similar to the yellow pages -- it's an index of stuff, some of which might not be legal or may be used for nefarious purposes, but which the yellow pages' publisher has nothing to do with other than indexing it.
So now do we sue the yellow pages for indexing sporting goods stores because someone used a deer rifle to rob the bank??
Damn, that's a good one... and I see I'm not the first to, uh, mis-hear "Burma save" today... and you're right (later post); fending for yourself DOES harden you. If it doesn't, you'll wind up a statistic yourself.
And I misread that as "the US thinks the people of Burma will cost $30 each to shave. Big difference." -- I gotta stop reading roadside signs before breakfast!
Or maybe it's just shock... $110M for what amounts to a search engine? Why don't the MPAA admit what they were really after is a hostile takeover??
My feeling exactly. DOOM got it right, in that it was so easy to suspend disbelief and just BE IN the game, even tho it looked like crap compared to modern games.
In fact, I've discovered that I *prefer* old DOOM's look and feel, probably because it's the complete fantasy world I want when I'm in the mood to slaughter hellspawn. If I wanted to kill creepy stuff in a realistic environment, I could shoot up my local Walmart instead.;)
That's a good point -- how much of the absurdly high price of Vista (and the too-high price of XP, compared to all M$ OSs before it) was geared toward pushing SaaS instead of retail purchase?
Back in 1999, at the Win2K launch, M$ tried to pawn off this idea onto a crowd of some 1000 corporate IT types... who all developed identical angry frowns. The idea was NOT popular. Since then the price of OSs has skyrocketed.... suddenly SaaS looks much more tempting.
Once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane...
That's a good point. Does this open them up to civil suits, or better yet criminal prosecution, for violating the Doctrine of First Sale by techno means??
Someone else up above speculated that this will be a precedent for movies and movie players, such that to play the DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever, the player will have to phone home first to check that it's a legit copy.
How is different from being forced to call and check in with the publisher every time you want to read a book that you BOUGHT?
And what about library-owned copies? How do you verify those?? if they're "pre-activated", what's to prevent a decent hacker from emulating that?
I speculate that once Treach^H^H^H^H Trusted Computing becomes widespread, all such phone-home media will perform some sort of check against the TC chip, and will store the hash on the remote server -- as much out of your reach as the innards of that TC chip. At that point, you'll be forced to buy copies of everything for each and every machine you want to use it on, or go through a "deactivate here, activate there" process each time you move the media to a different player.
My solution is rather more simple: I don't need any of their shit that bad; I just won't buy it.
Having been unfairly modded down a few times myself by people who merely disagree with me (and conversely, occasionally modded up for no reason I can figure) I agree, it's not perfect. But it's good enough for everyday use, and that's good enough for the average blog-comment. We're not writing Great Literature here; we're yakking in the local coffeehouse or bar. And that means we'll have the odd spilled cuppa-joe or obstreperous drunk. It keeps the bouncers off the streets.;)
"That is what they claim is copyright infringement. Now look at this example. You run wow after loading it into ram, then start a 3rd party program that makes a small change to it."
Let's change the example a little:
You run Photoshop after loading it into ram, then start a 3rd party program (such as a plugin) that makes a small change to how Photoshop works.
Or... You run Firefox after loading it into ram, then start a 3rd party program (such as AdBlock) that makes a small change to how Firefox works. (We'll pretend that browsers are commercial apps for a moment, for the sake of having a good example.)
You can see the can of worms this opens up -- any plugin, add-on, etc. could be affected by a ruling in WoW's favour.
To address a couple problems brought up by replies to yours (which is overall pretty reasonable):
Sale of copyright: This should be allowed, but only within the first copyright period (see below). I don't see that it makes any difference whether a *short term* copyright is owned by a natural person or by a corporation -- indeed, most of the time your best and perhaps only chance of making money on your copyrighted work is through publication by a corporate entity. Sometimes outright sale will net you more than waiting around for royalties (which could conceivably be much reduced by shorter copyrights).
Filing for copyright: someone pointed out, rightfully so, that the filing fee is prohibitive for many people. Okay, how about distinguishing between commercial and noncommercial copyright? Make noncommercial filing cheap or maybe even free (could be done online) but the moment you make significant money on it (let's put the threshold at say $1000, so really tiny pubs, fanfic, and the like, don't have to pay), you have to pay the filing fee for a commercial copyright. Occurs to me that this could also be used as the ONLY legit way to extend copyright -- noncom gets you NN years, and if you pay to file (meaning you're making some money from it so it's worth your while) then you get another NN years dating from the moment of the commercial copyright filing. But no more extensions after that.
Here is where sale of copyright comes into play: say you've filed noncommercial copyright, so you have legal protections, but are not making any real money (maybe cuz your marketing skilz suck). Along comes BigCorp and buys your work, and starts selling it. BigCorp must then file for commercial copyright, which automatically gives them that ONE extension -- sufficient time to recoup their investment and make some reasonable profit.
This scenario lets the creator get paid AND still allows commercial distribution (by persons or corps) without making it painful or not-worthwhile for either side of the equation. It would also allow work-for-hire where SomeCorp owns the output, without which some works (frex, textbooks) are not feasible to produce at all.
After RTFAing, I'm wondering about broader effects, such as plugins and 3rd party helper apps for all sorts of software. Could we find ourselves restricted from installing any plugin not "approved" by the base-program's vendor??
All sounds reasonable enough... In that context, we should consider how the trackability of cellphones perverts the "right to be lost" (which is effectively the right to be anonymous) and how to prevent their abuse.
Maybe the power switches need to have three settings: ON, OFF, and REALLY OFF. (Removing the batteries is a drag!)
(No, I don't have a cellphone at all, and this is one reason why. Tho mostly it's "Nothing is so important that it can't wait til I get home!")
That's true, but I suspect that in most cases where a person just suddenly goes missing AND does not want to be found, they were so overstressed (or wigged out) at the time that any sort of logical behaviour was out of the question, ESPECIALLY contact (even by the proxy of a note) with the people they wish to leave behind.
I agree entirely that it needs to be done by an "escrow service"... the cops could do it too, but I think a 3rd party would be better (given that anything gov't or gov't-mandated is too open to abuse). Didn't know the Sally Ann's did it, but definitely how it should be done -- so if you WANT to be missing, you can STAY missing.
Re:Second person shooter
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*BANG*
Y'all look mighty good hangin' on the wall above my monitor!
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna
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Heh... I got so annoyed with the NPCs in one game, that I shot them all instead of interacting with them.:)
Re:Choose your own adventure
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Second Person
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· Score: 1
I'm reminded of the old joke about the devout man who believed that every problem could be solved with the help of a randomly-chosen Bible verse. So one day he's feeling blue, opens the Good Book to learn what to do about it, and the first line he sees is "Judas went and hanged himself." Nah, that can't be right, so he tries again... only to read, "Go thou and do likewise."
Far as I know, police will not actually institute a search for a missing person unless there is some likelihood of bodily harm or misadventure.
However, I do think that if a missing person is "found" and declares that they wish to remain lost, the cops should, by law, be required to honour that.
Is there anything in law where if the authorities go looking for a missing person, and find them, the "missing" person can state that they WANT to remain "lost" and the authorities will have to honour that??
(I mean under normal, nonthreatening conditions, not just battered women's shelters and the like, where the assumption is already that you wish to remain "lost".)
I do... there are condos around here where you're not allowed to have waterbeds, cuz the weight is too much for the (under-engineered, true) floor joists.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably aimed at counterfeiters who produce fake disks by the truckload. And I don't have a problem with shutting *them* down.
But MOST businesses (legit or otherwise) rent, they don't own the building they're working out of. If the property in question was so used without its owner's knowledge, this is likely to produce a number of mortgage and tax defaults as owners whose commercial property cannot produce income for the next year find it more cost-effective to simply stop paying for it.
That aside, I'm wondering what impact this might have on private residences (both owner-occupant and rentals) if the tenant is convicted of filesharing. Does their concept go this far? Do proposed or existing laws address this?
What about selling them the domains now? if you don't plan to keep them, you might get something from these jerks for wasting your time. You might ask your lawyers about that.
;)
Of course, if you just let them expire, chances are they'll be snapped up by some squatter, and then they'll never get 'em
Making sure the defendant won't have time to respond is an old and oft-used trick. I would guess that's what happened here -- the letters were *deliberately* underpostaged, so that in no case would the defendant have the full two weeks to decide what to do. Whether this is still a binding letter probably varies by jurisdiction. In some areas, merely a "reasonable attempt to notify" is required, NOT an actual delivery.
A similar trick I've personally seen used for a sheriff's sale, where a member of that sheriff's department wanted to ensure that he would be the only bidder present, and that the owner would be unable to redeem his property: Legal notice of sale has to be posted in a public place. So... the legal notice was posted on a building at the fairgrounds. Which are technically "public" but in fact were locked and inaccessable for the whole notification period.
Those poor crew members are paid by the hour right up front, NOT via royalties. And they make damned good money. Most of 'em are union too (AFL-CIO, if I remember right), making union wages and union overtime and union benefits if they're laid off.
When I was working in the biz, some 20 years ago, one of the set truckers showed me his paystub. $30/hour for 8 hours plus 4 hours/day of overtime (2 at time and a half, 2 at double time), of which he actually worked two hours; the rest of the day he sat on his ass, but since he couldn't leave, he still got paid for his time. With overtime, his gross paycheck was $450 PER DAY.
And people wonder why Hollywood can claim that movies make no money... even when that's pure BS, they can still haul out numbers like these to show how much it cost them.
Occurs to me that a search engine is fundamentally similar to the yellow pages -- it's an index of stuff, some of which might not be legal or may be used for nefarious purposes, but which the yellow pages' publisher has nothing to do with other than indexing it.
So now do we sue the yellow pages for indexing sporting goods stores because someone used a deer rifle to rob the bank??
Damn, that's a good one... and I see I'm not the first to, uh, mis-hear "Burma save" today... and you're right (later post); fending for yourself DOES harden you. If it doesn't, you'll wind up a statistic yourself.
And I misread that as "the US thinks the people of Burma will cost $30 each to shave. Big difference." -- I gotta stop reading roadside signs before breakfast!
Or maybe it's just shock... $110M for what amounts to a search engine? Why don't the MPAA admit what they were really after is a hostile takeover??
My feeling exactly. DOOM got it right, in that it was so easy to suspend disbelief and just BE IN the game, even tho it looked like crap compared to modern games.
;)
In fact, I've discovered that I *prefer* old DOOM's look and feel, probably because it's the complete fantasy world I want when I'm in the mood to slaughter hellspawn. If I wanted to kill creepy stuff in a realistic environment, I could shoot up my local Walmart instead.
That's a good point -- how much of the absurdly high price of Vista (and the too-high price of XP, compared to all M$ OSs before it) was geared toward pushing SaaS instead of retail purchase?
Back in 1999, at the Win2K launch, M$ tried to pawn off this idea onto a crowd of some 1000 corporate IT types... who all developed identical angry frowns. The idea was NOT popular. Since then the price of OSs has skyrocketed.... suddenly SaaS looks much more tempting.
Once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane...
And how has DRM stopped sites like thepiratebay?? If anything, it has fueled them!
And there may be your solution for when a company dies and takes their DRM with them, along with your purchase's bought-and-paid-for usefulness.
That's a good point. Does this open them up to civil suits, or better yet criminal prosecution, for violating the Doctrine of First Sale by techno means??
Someone else up above speculated that this will be a precedent for movies and movie players, such that to play the DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever, the player will have to phone home first to check that it's a legit copy.
How is different from being forced to call and check in with the publisher every time you want to read a book that you BOUGHT?
And what about library-owned copies? How do you verify those?? if they're "pre-activated", what's to prevent a decent hacker from emulating that?
I speculate that once Treach^H^H^H^H Trusted Computing becomes widespread, all such phone-home media will perform some sort of check against the TC chip, and will store the hash on the remote server -- as much out of your reach as the innards of that TC chip. At that point, you'll be forced to buy copies of everything for each and every machine you want to use it on, or go through a "deactivate here, activate there" process each time you move the media to a different player.
My solution is rather more simple: I don't need any of their shit that bad; I just won't buy it.
Having been unfairly modded down a few times myself by people who merely disagree with me (and conversely, occasionally modded up for no reason I can figure) I agree, it's not perfect. But it's good enough for everyday use, and that's good enough for the average blog-comment. We're not writing Great Literature here; we're yakking in the local coffeehouse or bar. And that means we'll have the odd spilled cuppa-joe or obstreperous drunk. It keeps the bouncers off the streets. ;)
"That is what they claim is copyright infringement. Now look at this example. You run wow after loading it into ram, then start a 3rd party program that makes a small change to it."
Let's change the example a little:
You run Photoshop after loading it into ram, then start a 3rd party program (such as a plugin) that makes a small change to how Photoshop works.
Or... You run Firefox after loading it into ram, then start a 3rd party program (such as AdBlock) that makes a small change to how Firefox works. (We'll pretend that browsers are commercial apps for a moment, for the sake of having a good example.)
You can see the can of worms this opens up -- any plugin, add-on, etc. could be affected by a ruling in WoW's favour.
To address a couple problems brought up by replies to yours (which is overall pretty reasonable):
Sale of copyright: This should be allowed, but only within the first copyright period (see below). I don't see that it makes any difference whether a *short term* copyright is owned by a natural person or by a corporation -- indeed, most of the time your best and perhaps only chance of making money on your copyrighted work is through publication by a corporate entity. Sometimes outright sale will net you more than waiting around for royalties (which could conceivably be much reduced by shorter copyrights).
Filing for copyright: someone pointed out, rightfully so, that the filing fee is prohibitive for many people. Okay, how about distinguishing between commercial and noncommercial copyright? Make noncommercial filing cheap or maybe even free (could be done online) but the moment you make significant money on it (let's put the threshold at say $1000, so really tiny pubs, fanfic, and the like, don't have to pay), you have to pay the filing fee for a commercial copyright. Occurs to me that this could also be used as the ONLY legit way to extend copyright -- noncom gets you NN years, and if you pay to file (meaning you're making some money from it so it's worth your while) then you get another NN years dating from the moment of the commercial copyright filing. But no more extensions after that.
Here is where sale of copyright comes into play: say you've filed noncommercial copyright, so you have legal protections, but are not making any real money (maybe cuz your marketing skilz suck). Along comes BigCorp and buys your work, and starts selling it. BigCorp must then file for commercial copyright, which automatically gives them that ONE extension -- sufficient time to recoup their investment and make some reasonable profit.
This scenario lets the creator get paid AND still allows commercial distribution (by persons or corps) without making it painful or not-worthwhile for either side of the equation. It would also allow work-for-hire where SomeCorp owns the output, without which some works (frex, textbooks) are not feasible to produce at all.
After RTFAing, I'm wondering about broader effects, such as plugins and 3rd party helper apps for all sorts of software. Could we find ourselves restricted from installing any plugin not "approved" by the base-program's vendor??
All sounds reasonable enough... In that context, we should consider how the trackability of cellphones perverts the "right to be lost" (which is effectively the right to be anonymous) and how to prevent their abuse.
Maybe the power switches need to have three settings: ON, OFF, and REALLY OFF. (Removing the batteries is a drag!)
(No, I don't have a cellphone at all, and this is one reason why. Tho mostly it's "Nothing is so important that it can't wait til I get home!")
That's true, but I suspect that in most cases where a person just suddenly goes missing AND does not want to be found, they were so overstressed (or wigged out) at the time that any sort of logical behaviour was out of the question, ESPECIALLY contact (even by the proxy of a note) with the people they wish to leave behind.
I agree entirely that it needs to be done by an "escrow service" ... the cops could do it too, but I think a 3rd party would be better (given that anything gov't or gov't-mandated is too open to abuse). Didn't know the Sally Ann's did it, but definitely how it should be done -- so if you WANT to be missing, you can STAY missing.
*BANG*
Y'all look mighty good hangin' on the wall above my monitor!
Heh... I got so annoyed with the NPCs in one game, that I shot them all instead of interacting with them. :)
I'm reminded of the old joke about the devout man who believed that every problem could be solved with the help of a randomly-chosen Bible verse. So one day he's feeling blue, opens the Good Book to learn what to do about it, and the first line he sees is "Judas went and hanged himself." Nah, that can't be right, so he tries again... only to read, "Go thou and do likewise."
Far as I know, police will not actually institute a search for a missing person unless there is some likelihood of bodily harm or misadventure.
However, I do think that if a missing person is "found" and declares that they wish to remain lost, the cops should, by law, be required to honour that.
Is there anything in law where if the authorities go looking for a missing person, and find them, the "missing" person can state that they WANT to remain "lost" and the authorities will have to honour that??
(I mean under normal, nonthreatening conditions, not just battered women's shelters and the like, where the assumption is already that you wish to remain "lost".)
Got any idea how much that water weighs?
I do... there are condos around here where you're not allowed to have waterbeds, cuz the weight is too much for the (under-engineered, true) floor joists.