No one with an ounce of intelligence is going to reclaim ownership on something they don't actually own or where this is no real dispute of ownership. The statement you file back is a sworn document and could be used bring perjury charges if the reclaim is seen to be completely bogus. So the issue of posters being sued for reclaiming ownership and losing in my opinion would be non-existent and if someone did you could in fact use the claim as justifiable evidence of compromised judgment or mental instability. In fact I believe so strongly this wouldn't occur with any sane individual where no real dispute of ownership exists that I would say there is a good chance the Judge would order a mental evaluation of the original poster for making such a ridiculous statement.
YouTube and the other providers don't respond to reclaiming ownership simply because probably nobody has followed the letter of the law and issued the secondary claim of ownership. Under a system where the provider reacts under the law once the second claim of ownership is received and the provider reposts the disputed content the provider is still covered under the Safe Harbor terms. In fact implementing an easy system to submit these "repost" notices with instructions to the users on the exact framing and terms that must be used to meet the letter of the law and who to submit it to at YouTube would go miles to help users understand that the DCMA isn't some evil instrument of big organizations but actually a pretty fair law (for copyright holders, big or small) that helps protect copyright while handling the issue that it's often difficult to identify individuals on the internet. The DMCA take down notice is nothing more than a statement saying take "x" down until the person who posted it identifies themselves to me so I can sue them to get an injunction. If you legitimately own the copyright it SHOULD be a slam dunk to reverse the take down notice and both individuals then know who's involved so they can start REAL court proceedings without anyone being able to claim it was someone other than themselves.
I actually think the DMCA is a very balanced (in the sense of size of the participants) law, in that it recognizes the difficulty in identification on the internet and uses probably the least invasive technique to allow immediate hosting of content and the protection of copyright with minimal delays. Under pre-DCMA terms you would have had to sue the provider to get the name of the poster, then launch a suit against the poster and ask for an injunction on the posting to get it down (probably 2 weeks or more under the most expedited court proceeding ever). With the simplified procedure you simply issue a sworn statement claiming ownership, the provider takes it down and notifies the poster, the poster then claims ownership and provides name, address etc... (to make a lawsuit easier to file) and the provider can then repost the material without fear of being liable for hosting the content. Then the two claimants go to court, one side proves ownership and an injunction is issued to the provider to take down and not repost the material or the original claim is voided and an injunction is issued against further claims of ownership. This way the copyright owner gets to find out who put it up, or it goes away immediately, the provider isn't liable and in the case where someone claims ownership and doesn't own it, the material can then be reposted very quickly and the original claimant then has to decide if they think their claim is strong enough to go to court or if the original poster actually owned the copyright and felt they were damaged by the false claim they could then sue the claimant to recover the damages.
As I said, if it was handled correctly by the providers these incidents wouldn't occur frequently, and could be corrected VERY quickly and the claimants would be forced into highly stupid lawsuits.. It wouldn't be difficult IMO if you had filmed that sequence with Uri Geller to take him to court for damages, and in the case of such a blatantly false claim you could probably get punitive damages for Uri committing perjury in claiming ownership when he in fact he didn't have copyright.
Considering that if you own the copyright and someone claims they own the copyright and interferes in your business they have violated your copyright I would say you CAN sue for $150k, and there is also probably an additional tort for the interference with your business relationship with your hosting provider.
What you are really saying is that you wish someone would take someone to court for a false DCMA notice and win a large judgement, thus setting a public precedent that will scare others into not abusing the safe harbor provisions of the DCMA.
Yes, but YouTube also doesn't follow the provisions of the law that say that if the poster of the material reply's back with a statement claiming ownership and authoritative information about who they are that will allow the claimer of copyright to sue then YouTube can then repost the material until a court order is obtained. In fact NONE of the ISP's follow this second provision of the law and I haven't seen one that once provided this lawfull statement will repost the material. If someone like the victim here hired a lawyer and sued YouTube for violation of the safeharbor rules then there would be posted procedures for waiving the DCMA notice.
He is a Canadian national who was living in Canada and running his own Canadian business within Canada, and was charged and convicted by a US court for doing so.
He was living in Canada up until he moved to the US working for the company for which he did almost all his business previously which was engaged in the diversion of US products to Cuba through Canada. Because there is no further detail on the 7 charges that related to his time in Canada, and his lawyers had ample time to protest charges that he couldn't legally be charged with unless their were extenuating circumstances I have to assume there was evidence he conspired to break US law just like the say Columbian Cartel members did that are now in US jails. There is also the issue in understanding that when you are operating an international business you can in fact violate laws outside your own country where something that is illegal is not illegal in your country.
For example, it may not be illegal in to be involved in the creation and export via carriers of Heroin into Canada, but I guarantee that if such a person comes to Canada (and even not transporting themselves) they will still be prosecuted under Canadian law even though what they did may not have been illegal in their country. I would also suspect that this has already happened numerous times, yet where is your anger that Canada engages in prosecution of people who were engaged in commerce that wasn't illegal in their own country? Maybe it has something to do with facilitating the breaking of Canadian law. After all, someone who is deliberately trying to smuggle Heroin into Canada is breaking Canadian law even if they aren't the person doing the smuggling and they have never been to Canada, just as owning a business who's sole purpose is to divert US product to Cuba in violation of the US embargo is asking for criminal charges if they ever enter the US. There's a simple rule, if you are breaking a foreign countries laws, you better not go there. If I had been operating a smuggling operation into Canada, for which the Canadians were aware of my actions, I wouldn't be visiting anytime soon. Or if I was engaged in the shipment of Nazi products to Germany (not a bit illegal in the US) I probably wouldn't travel to Germany because I would likely be arrested and prosecuted under Germany's laws about the production and distribution to Germans of the material. (real life case from just a little while ago). I have no doubt the guy would have never been charged for activities in Canada had he not been buying the product from the US, had his purchases been anywhere other than the US they would have had no basis to charge him, but diverting US products to Cuba he was violating US laws, regardless of where he lives. You want to sell product to Cuba? Don't buy it from the US, cause if you do you better not ever enter the US again.
The federal government is not authorized by the Constitution to regulate the credit industry. I hope no legislation of this nature becomes law because it would be unconstitutional.
Credit is interesting, what would I call it without the name "credit". Probably I would call it a form of banking, as it's essentially an offer to loan money. This seems to fit as only bank's and other financial institutions can offer credit. Now what is one particular attribute of credit? To avoid usury laws in most states credit offering institutions have focused on two states that eliminated all usury laws, South Dakota and Delaware. As a result all the banking involved is primarily over state lines because the major credit offers (Visa/Mastercard/etc..) reside in two states while local banks offer credit cards on those networks. So really I would call credit, interstate banking. Banking is a form of commerce. So I guess credit is really interstate commerce. Coincidentally, I seem to remember the constitution authorizing the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. Funny that.
Actually it should be left to the developer of the code to choose how his/her code is used. By providing GPL3 the FSF provides developers the option to say "if you use my code you have to allow open access". I suspect that a lot of GPL developers will move to version 3. That is where the FSF's question comes about, because if the major packages all go GPL3 then 5 years down the road the apple's and Tivo's of the world are going to still be stuck running 2007 code that they maintain themselves. Not only that but they can no longer use the bug fixes (and will actually have to come up with their own fix that is independent of and not reliant on the fix prepared by the GPL3 software) and updates in the software provided by the community. Today that doesn't mean anything, but 5 years down the road it will mean something and it could be extremely negative for some of these commercial companies that want to keep their code from being "tampered" with.
If the GPL3 does change things in this manner, then either the commercial companies bail out of linux and GPL code or they have to make it so the tinkerers out there can modify the code on the device they purchased. If it's the later then everyone wins, and if it's the former it would be difficult to predict what will happen, most likely the proprietary OS's will see a resurgence as the device manufacturers will believe they are being forced into no longer using GPL software.
That's hardly an example of what you insinuate. The guy was Canadian, living in the US, working for a US company, working to avoid US export law by transporting product through Canada to avoid the US embargo. Except for the counts that apply to the years he was in Canada, he broke US law while in the US, and those prior counts might apply if he applied for and received US citizenship while living here. In fact I'll leave that up to his lawyers to argue. Anyway, regardless of the 7 counts from time in Canada there were 13 other counts from actions while in the US. In addition the prosecutor is only asking for 5 years when the maximum sentence is 200 years.
So contrary to your point, the US isn't trying to enforce US law on Canadians living in Canada, but they will enforce it on Canadians living and working in the US in a job that was specifically created to avoid compliance with US export rules. Just because he's Canadian (and living in the US) US laws don't apply? It's actually funny to read his statement saying as a Canadian he's obligated to deliberatly ignore the embargo, might be true in Canada but if he's living and working on the other side of the border he's meat for Customs to chew up and spit into jail. Not only that but they are being EXTREMELY lenient on him. He could've served the rest of his life in a maximum security federal prison.
If lower orbits are out, so are almost every military satellite, which includes GPS, and it's international variants. In addition you can kiss the Iridium System goodbye. And I'm sure there are hundreds of other satellites in low earth orbit that people, countries and the militarys of the world find are 100% necessary.
This alone is a death kneel for the entire concept. The 100's of satellites in low earth orbit don't have the booster fuel to be dodging a big flying guillotine in space, even if it only comes around every 5 years.
There will be the typical outcry that it's being proposed to either stop Mexicans from migrating, deprive Latinos work and money (vast chunks of central America and Mexico are now completely dependent on migrant labor money that is sent home) And there will of course be comments from what is typical of ignorant people that call themselves liberal (and aren't).
The fact is immigration reform that removes illegal migrants and eliminates even agricultural migrant's will be good for America in every way. The US economy has moved to a very strong dependence on what can only be called slave labor. Illegal migrants are frequently put in job's that pay less than US minimum wage standards and don't meet US minimum safety standards. There can be no argument that the continual immigration of people to the US helps the American economy, even illegal migration helps, the question is does it help more than controlled immigration does. But the fact is, how illegal workers are treated in this country is akin to the sharecrop system of virtual slavery that developed in the south after the civil war. It's also a fact that eliminating the cheap slave labor will force technological solutions that in the end will generate a significant number of high paying tech jobs.
As citizens we have to decide if we believe in the values we enshrine. If the wholesale exploitation of people to keep fruit and veggy prices low fits with our values. Sure, the migrants will tell you that they love living in America and that they do the hard work so their children have a chance that they wouldn't have in their home countries. Again, we have to ask ourselves, wouldn't it be better to allow REAL immigration instead of speaking out about illegal migration while we turn a blind eye to the illegal migration (US policy for the last 20 years).
How many people do you know that have turned in the local small businesses that are employing illegal migrants and in the process pricing out everyone else that is playing by the rules ?(Construction is by far the worst for this)? Illegal migration artificially deflates labor prices, it's the reason the republican's have used to keep the minimum wage from changing and it's also the reason that some jobs have such low labor rates that no one but illegal migrants can afford the job, thereby providing an excuse to right wing policy makers that the migrants are only taking jobs that American's won't. Without illegal migrants in the equation labor rates would be forced by supply and demand to provide a real living wage.
Initially Y >> X, but the deal requires yearly payments from Novell for basically the remainder of their existence. In the long term X >>>>>> Y. Sure Novell gets a very much needed cash infusion, but long term they sold their soul to the devil. Those yearly payments to Microsoft are going to get very ugly when/if Novell is low on cash again. You don't ever want to trade a large cash settlement for smaller payments with no end date because the day will come when those payments exceed the money received and Microsoft's long term strategy begins to pay substantial cash.
When talking about the deal I haven't seen any comments on the long term payments Novell must make on every copy of Linux distributed. If Novell becomes successful they will be paying a percentage to MS. It's a Win-Win for MS and a lose-lose for Novell.
Back when I was running a very small PC resale business, about 6 years ago, I believe the numbers I saw said white box sales accounted for close to 20% of PC Sales. Now that the aggressive pricing by DELL and other OEM's have driven a significant number of the mom and pop's out of business (including myself)I would wager that number has dropped a bit, but I wouldn't say that US sales of white box's has dropped below 10%, in fact I bet that number is a bit higher. But keep in mind, in the timeframe WGA was created that number was much closer to 20% of sales.
The problem is that a LOT of the white box sellers didn't used to sell genuine copies of windows with their sales. In fact I would bet that the number of white box sellers with pirated copies, because the OS costs often make the computers more expensive than the OEM's, has in fact increased significantly. What would you do if 10-12% of your total business was being lost to unscrupulous sellers? WGA was always implemented as a system to stop the white box sellers who weren't legit, in fact if you buy a PC without a valid license and you turn in the reseller you get a free copy of windows. Microsoft doesn't want to punish innocent victims.
I don't agree with a lot of Microsoft's business practices, but the fact is WGA was created to stop white box sellers who were using pirated copies of windows. The point was to make the purchaser aware of what happened so they will in turn report the reseller and the BSA can drop by and sue them out of existence. WGA has actually been VERY successful at stopping this practice and eliminating the white box sellers who engaged in this practice. It has also had the added benefit of stopping the casual pirate, ie. the guy that buys one copy and installs it on multiple PC's.
I imagine the next version of WGA (the one built into Vista) will be updated with SP1 to Stop pirates as that is the next big frontier for making all Western sales of Windows legit. The reason it wasn't implemented this way originally is because Microsoft thought they made Vista impossible to activate without a genuine license.
I stopped reading when you said communism was an economic system. Blatantly, horribly wrong.
Socialism is an economic system, Communism is a political system. Communism engages in socialism, but every other political system on the planet, including democracy, engages in socialism as well. The distinction between communism and democracy is that communism is created as a system where a small group of self-selected individuals rule the lives of the rest. Typical communist parties have real membership of less than 20% of the population, and decisions making is often less than 5%, typically the party is controlled by small groups of families as well. Leaders are selected within the party ONLY, and obedience to the party is paramount over the needs of the people. No human rights are guaranteed, people are treated as assets and property, rather than people. When communist leaders speak of the importance of the state/people, they are in fact referring to the importance of the continued rule and satisfaction of the party members, and in particular the leadership.
As an example consider China, do you think a single ruling party members lives in remotely the same conditions as the rest of the population? The reality is, that just like Soviet Communism the living standards of the ruling party members far exceeds that of even some of the richest westerners. If the needs of the people were truly the most important as they claim, that wouldn't be true.
Communism is a political system based on totalitarian rule, nothing unique about it. It's disregard for humanity exceeds nearly every other system of politics.
I hope they are ready for the "if they are filtering that, why are't they filtering X" where X = Almost anything someone has their panties in a bunch about. I predict a SHARP rise in subscription losses.
Statistics aren't copyrightable (Supreme court ruling and all that). Otherwise major league baseball would be taking a cut from every fantasy league. Chip counts and such silly things would fall under "statistics". If he convinces some lawyer to sue, the suit will be tossed almost immediately based on the supreme court ruling regarding statistics.
You are obsolutely correct. He is completely free to provide any coverage he wants under our first amendment privlidges and the GOVERNMENT cannot put him jail. (because as you are aware the first amendment ONLY covers the actions of government and the use of the government right to take away civil liberties, or in other words to send people to jail)
Of course the owner of the stadium (and by prescriptive/contractual right the NCAA) also has the right to refuse entry or kick out anyone for any reason.
Funny, both groups exercise their rights independently and you get up in arms and give a big post about how he can violate the stadium owners rights with impunity because it's a first amendment issue. Just remember, you have the right to say whatever you want in a public place, you come in my house and say stuff I don't like and you're leaving, possibly in motion while airborne.
It's usually customs that is involved in counterfeit cases, and counterfeit sales usually nets at least a year in prison. Now you know why the vendors ran without even getting their money.
Not full bibles. They would be forced to buy a chapter or a single verse. Scientology is all about making you pay, and making you pay more to learn more (and dividing that learning up into the smallest possible segments so that they can maximize your "contributions"). That is why they closely guard the copyrights on their material because it is a primary source of revenue. Without it they would have to generate more material that was under copyright to sell and frankly, no one in the organization now has the science fiction credentials to write the religious material like Hubbard did.
Dyanetics is the book Hubbard wrote to recruit. After that there are many many training and learning materials that mainly Hubbard put together before his death. Sure they have generated more training material but without Hubbards creativity they are lacking the kind of Science Fiction writer they would need to continue to generate newer "religious" materials to charge for.
Personally I think everyone should boycott Tom Cruise, John Travolta and the other Scientologist actors as they pump millions into the organization every year and make it more powerful. I know I avoid their movies at all costs where I am contributing finances directly to the actor as I know a good percentage of that revenue ends up in Scientology coffers.
It would have honestly not mattered if you had or hadn't with godaddy involved. Your domain is likely up for auction right now. Godaddy is terribly unscrupulous, but they don't make a secret of their domain stealing activities, it's right in their TOS.
Do you know why there is a scapegoat? Because in America if the one committing the crime dies, they have to find someone else to punish. The media response is simply a reflection of the general attitudes of the community. You might not agree by 9 times out of 10 what the media does is reinforce the strongest idea circulating at the time. The media is partially the problem, if real journalism existed such lambasting of a innocent people wouldn't happen, but the fact is the problem is with everyone, not just the media. I can't tell you the number of people I heard making comments about how the school didn't do enough (and I live in the rocky mountains), how many of the parents and "community activists" sought to blame the school, the administration or the courts.
It seems to be a culture in America that developed in the 80's that someone has to go to jail or loose their job when tragedies happen. If the criminal in question commits suicide (and thus atones for the crime) the American people often demand another sacrifice, and the press runs right along with it. Hell the parents of the shooter HAD to apologize for the behavior of their ADULT son. I thought America was a country where you didn't answer for the crimes of relatives, but that clearly changed in the 80's.
As someone who not only has been discharged from fairly major surgery, including an angiogram of the brain and eye surgery that involved entering the brain cavity, and dealt with the problems of getting other loved ones out of complicated medical situations, I think I can say affirmatively when getting someone discharged the top priority is keeping things comfortable and sane for the discharged patient. It can do more harm to the person you love to make them wait 4 hours while you argue with nurses who clearly don't know what is going on (usually because they just started their shift and they never worked with the patient, or because they simply can't read the doctors handwriting on the chart), or can't be understood.
In fact a wait of that long in a situation like that could result in life threatening complications as heart surgery often involves the use of blood thinners and home dosage is either done by self injection or pills which are not monitored as closely as the heparin solutions given through IV. It's critically important that when discharging a patient the information does NOT need to be requested and in fact it should all be preprinted waiting for the pickup. This is standard practice in EVERY other hospital in the US. Bad information leads to malpractice suits, and not having a policy on information provided at discharge, or not following that policy can lead to VERY very expensive negligence or malpractice lawsuits.
If I were a shareholder of KP I would be livid after reading all this information. The company is clearly mismanaged and if it's not corrected immediately the entire company is at risk, not just from overspending of a change in cashflow, but lawsuits as this information release gives ambulance chaser lawyers significant basis for suit. Loss of information tied to implementation of a digital system that is inferior to the prior system and doesn't meet industry standards for availability (Healthcare IIRC has a standard of 99.9999% availability at most organizations with down times of less than 30 minutes) or accuracy is a major lawsuit waiting to happen. All you need is someone that has critical complications that disables them permanently or a death which can be tied to information availability and you have a multi billion dollar negligence, incompetence and malpractice suit. If there are any lawyers of the type mentioned above reading Slashdot they are likely salivating and are considering commercials on TV to find clients.
Typical Euro-trash babbling. America is doomed! Doomed I say! Yet America still sustains a minimum of 3-4% GDP growth per year. Far in excess of the 1% in Europe. America also has employment rates that are near full. In fact 11 million illegal migrant workers wouldn't be here if the jobs weren't here. Yet in Europe the age group of 18-30 has unemployment of nearly 20%!! And country wide unemployment near 10-12% depending on which euro-trash country you are looking at. Racial segregation is a dividing force and has led to race riots. Something America hasn't seen since the 1960's. Europe also faces rashes of Islamic terrorism with large minorities of disaffected and unemployed Muslim youth. Whereas in the US the Muslim community is prosperous and nearly fully integrated into the US. France has more debt as a percentage of GDP than the US has, France and Germany both fail to meet the minimum debt/spending standards for the EU every single year.
With climbing unemployment, no growth, stagnant to declining economies, high susceptibility to the effects of global warming and a unrest population with poor integration of immigrants on the footstep of a potentially hostile group of people and inadequate defenses to defend even the home country I'd bet Western Europe bit the dust long before the US ever "collapses" as you put it.
The fact is neither Europe nor the US are going anywhere fast. The US has faced challenges the last few years, in particular because of the current administration but if you think it's going to lead to the collapse of the US, or it's economy, you're an ignorant fool.
The Chunnel and Big Dig would share nothing in common with this project. Labor and Materials would be sourced from Asia and far cheaper than US resources. Labor would likely be a combination of Chinese and Russian, and the tunnel isn't being built on the edge of a fully developed city. Everything about this project would be virgin, and virgin construction is often half or less the price of construction where your dealing with property issues and relocations and keeping existing routes open, and that's across the board with the same fixed costs (labor, materials and equipment).
Toss in discounts on materials and labor mentioned above, and leave out the costs of safety measures and then you have a project that could be done at a 10th the cost of European or US construction and that doesn't even include discounts for easier engineering. The Chunnel and Big Dig had serious Geotechnical issues that relied on brand new and expensive concepts to mitigate, for example, the Boston Tunnel isn't under the floor of the ocean, it sits on top. Not only that, but the Big Dig sits in probably the WORST labor market in the US, everything in Union, and by that I mean bad Union where organized crime is still involved. I doubt the bearing straight suffers from the same Geotech issues and it definitely won't suffer the labor issues. Also, the Chunnel had to deal with the fact that England and France are pulling apart at about an inch a year, this tunnel would sit well north of the ring of fire and would be dug through all of one plate.
It's undoubtedly true that given the difficulty in these type of projects due to the unknowns, that you should probably double the costs, but even still the cost to construct will be a fraction per mile of what the Chunnel or Big Dig took. The big question really is who pays for it, because if it's US taxpayers that are supposed to foot the bill so Russia and China can ship stuff here easier then I'm not a big supporter of the idea. If Russia and China each wanted to kick in a third of the cost the project sounds incredibly interesting. Split three ways the project would be very inexpensive in consideration of the benefits.
Want to know the biggest reason to build the tunnel? We could fix the road on the Russian side, and build a road from Anchorage to the states (expensive though that would be, it's not as expensive as you think, building a road on an established roadbed with new bridges isn't terribly expensive, especially when the Russians could build it for almost nothing given they have essentially free oil and the US land side link to Alaska using a full interstate design has already had preliminary engineering done and if I remember right priced in at about 5 billion 3-4 years ago). After completion the US would have direct access to Russian resources, and the Russians would have direct access to US manufactured goods and food stuffs. Not only that but a link from Northern China would not be out of the question. Can you even imagine the benefit of a land line and rail link to China and Russia would mean? Shipping goods across the ocean is risky, time consuming and expensive. Link it all up by rail, especially a high speed rail and you have one of the most amazing commercial links ever constructed. Not only that but at the same time an oil pipeline from Siberia to the mainline US could be constructed. Constructing this would pay for itself in probably a dozen years or less just on the additional commerce that would be possible with Russia and China.
How cool would it be to ride a Train from LA to Shanghai or Moscow?
Lets be clear, none of those conditions would eliminate the possibility of a crossing. Not even putting the bridge right across the fault as we have numerous bridges that cross faults, including the San Andreas fault which is IIRC the most active fault in the world. The problem isn't the engineering, it's the cost. Why would you spend 10-50 billion dollars when a 10 minute ferry ride provides the same service with minimal delay? That's the whole reason the earmark Bridges in Alaska have been criticized so heavily, they replace a 5 minute ferry ride with a 300 million dollar bridge. Part of Transportation planning is realizing when making the improvement just isn't worth the cost, no matter how convenient or nice it would be.
Yes we have those laws to. Is it harassment if you had something stolen and you were suing someone to reclaim the lost property value in Turkey? Cause contrary to what you and many others think about it, Sharing and Downloading of Copyrighted material is illegal in the US, and likely is in Turkey as well. It's not harassment to recover damages using the court system.
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No one with an ounce of intelligence is going to reclaim ownership on something they don't actually own or where this is no real dispute of ownership. The statement you file back is a sworn document and could be used bring perjury charges if the reclaim is seen to be completely bogus. So the issue of posters being sued for reclaiming ownership and losing in my opinion would be non-existent and if someone did you could in fact use the claim as justifiable evidence of compromised judgment or mental instability. In fact I believe so strongly this wouldn't occur with any sane individual where no real dispute of ownership exists that I would say there is a good chance the Judge would order a mental evaluation of the original poster for making such a ridiculous statement.
YouTube and the other providers don't respond to reclaiming ownership simply because probably nobody has followed the letter of the law and issued the secondary claim of ownership. Under a system where the provider reacts under the law once the second claim of ownership is received and the provider reposts the disputed content the provider is still covered under the Safe Harbor terms. In fact implementing an easy system to submit these "repost" notices with instructions to the users on the exact framing and terms that must be used to meet the letter of the law and who to submit it to at YouTube would go miles to help users understand that the DCMA isn't some evil instrument of big organizations but actually a pretty fair law (for copyright holders, big or small) that helps protect copyright while handling the issue that it's often difficult to identify individuals on the internet. The DMCA take down notice is nothing more than a statement saying take "x" down until the person who posted it identifies themselves to me so I can sue them to get an injunction. If you legitimately own the copyright it SHOULD be a slam dunk to reverse the take down notice and both individuals then know who's involved so they can start REAL court proceedings without anyone being able to claim it was someone other than themselves.
I actually think the DMCA is a very balanced (in the sense of size of the participants) law, in that it recognizes the difficulty in identification on the internet and uses probably the least invasive technique to allow immediate hosting of content and the protection of copyright with minimal delays. Under pre-DCMA terms you would have had to sue the provider to get the name of the poster, then launch a suit against the poster and ask for an injunction on the posting to get it down (probably 2 weeks or more under the most expedited court proceeding ever). With the simplified procedure you simply issue a sworn statement claiming ownership, the provider takes it down and notifies the poster, the poster then claims ownership and provides name, address etc... (to make a lawsuit easier to file) and the provider can then repost the material without fear of being liable for hosting the content. Then the two claimants go to court, one side proves ownership and an injunction is issued to the provider to take down and not repost the material or the original claim is voided and an injunction is issued against further claims of ownership. This way the copyright owner gets to find out who put it up, or it goes away immediately, the provider isn't liable and in the case where someone claims ownership and doesn't own it, the material can then be reposted very quickly and the original claimant then has to decide if they think their claim is strong enough to go to court or if the original poster actually owned the copyright and felt they were damaged by the false claim they could then sue the claimant to recover the damages.
As I said, if it was handled correctly by the providers these incidents wouldn't occur frequently, and could be corrected VERY quickly and the claimants would be forced into highly stupid lawsuits.. It wouldn't be difficult IMO if you had filmed that sequence with Uri Geller to take him to court for damages, and in the case of such a blatantly false claim you could probably get punitive damages for Uri committing perjury in claiming ownership when he in fact he didn't have copyright.
Considering that if you own the copyright and someone claims they own the copyright and interferes in your business they have violated your copyright I would say you CAN sue for $150k, and there is also probably an additional tort for the interference with your business relationship with your hosting provider.
What you are really saying is that you wish someone would take someone to court for a false DCMA notice and win a large judgement, thus setting a public precedent that will scare others into not abusing the safe harbor provisions of the DCMA.
Yes, but YouTube also doesn't follow the provisions of the law that say that if the poster of the material reply's back with a statement claiming ownership and authoritative information about who they are that will allow the claimer of copyright to sue then YouTube can then repost the material until a court order is obtained. In fact NONE of the ISP's follow this second provision of the law and I haven't seen one that once provided this lawfull statement will repost the material. If someone like the victim here hired a lawyer and sued YouTube for violation of the safeharbor rules then there would be posted procedures for waiving the DCMA notice.
He was living in Canada up until he moved to the US working for the company for which he did almost all his business previously which was engaged in the diversion of US products to Cuba through Canada. Because there is no further detail on the 7 charges that related to his time in Canada, and his lawyers had ample time to protest charges that he couldn't legally be charged with unless their were extenuating circumstances I have to assume there was evidence he conspired to break US law just like the say Columbian Cartel members did that are now in US jails. There is also the issue in understanding that when you are operating an international business you can in fact violate laws outside your own country where something that is illegal is not illegal in your country.
For example, it may not be illegal in to be involved in the creation and export via carriers of Heroin into Canada, but I guarantee that if such a person comes to Canada (and even not transporting themselves) they will still be prosecuted under Canadian law even though what they did may not have been illegal in their country. I would also suspect that this has already happened numerous times, yet where is your anger that Canada engages in prosecution of people who were engaged in commerce that wasn't illegal in their own country? Maybe it has something to do with facilitating the breaking of Canadian law. After all, someone who is deliberately trying to smuggle Heroin into Canada is breaking Canadian law even if they aren't the person doing the smuggling and they have never been to Canada, just as owning a business who's sole purpose is to divert US product to Cuba in violation of the US embargo is asking for criminal charges if they ever enter the US. There's a simple rule, if you are breaking a foreign countries laws, you better not go there. If I had been operating a smuggling operation into Canada, for which the Canadians were aware of my actions, I wouldn't be visiting anytime soon. Or if I was engaged in the shipment of Nazi products to Germany (not a bit illegal in the US) I probably wouldn't travel to Germany because I would likely be arrested and prosecuted under Germany's laws about the production and distribution to Germans of the material. (real life case from just a little while ago). I have no doubt the guy would have never been charged for activities in Canada had he not been buying the product from the US, had his purchases been anywhere other than the US they would have had no basis to charge him, but diverting US products to Cuba he was violating US laws, regardless of where he lives. You want to sell product to Cuba? Don't buy it from the US, cause if you do you better not ever enter the US again.
Credit is interesting, what would I call it without the name "credit". Probably I would call it a form of banking, as it's essentially an offer to loan money. This seems to fit as only bank's and other financial institutions can offer credit. Now what is one particular attribute of credit? To avoid usury laws in most states credit offering institutions have focused on two states that eliminated all usury laws, South Dakota and Delaware. As a result all the banking involved is primarily over state lines because the major credit offers (Visa/Mastercard/etc..) reside in two states while local banks offer credit cards on those networks. So really I would call credit, interstate banking. Banking is a form of commerce. So I guess credit is really interstate commerce. Coincidentally, I seem to remember the constitution authorizing the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. Funny that.
Actually it should be left to the developer of the code to choose how his/her code is used. By providing GPL3 the FSF provides developers the option to say "if you use my code you have to allow open access". I suspect that a lot of GPL developers will move to version 3. That is where the FSF's question comes about, because if the major packages all go GPL3 then 5 years down the road the apple's and Tivo's of the world are going to still be stuck running 2007 code that they maintain themselves. Not only that but they can no longer use the bug fixes (and will actually have to come up with their own fix that is independent of and not reliant on the fix prepared by the GPL3 software) and updates in the software provided by the community. Today that doesn't mean anything, but 5 years down the road it will mean something and it could be extremely negative for some of these commercial companies that want to keep their code from being "tampered" with.
If the GPL3 does change things in this manner, then either the commercial companies bail out of linux and GPL code or they have to make it so the tinkerers out there can modify the code on the device they purchased. If it's the later then everyone wins, and if it's the former it would be difficult to predict what will happen, most likely the proprietary OS's will see a resurgence as the device manufacturers will believe they are being forced into no longer using GPL software.
That's hardly an example of what you insinuate. The guy was Canadian, living in the US, working for a US company, working to avoid US export law by transporting product through Canada to avoid the US embargo. Except for the counts that apply to the years he was in Canada, he broke US law while in the US, and those prior counts might apply if he applied for and received US citizenship while living here. In fact I'll leave that up to his lawyers to argue. Anyway, regardless of the 7 counts from time in Canada there were 13 other counts from actions while in the US. In addition the prosecutor is only asking for 5 years when the maximum sentence is 200 years.
So contrary to your point, the US isn't trying to enforce US law on Canadians living in Canada, but they will enforce it on Canadians living and working in the US in a job that was specifically created to avoid compliance with US export rules. Just because he's Canadian (and living in the US) US laws don't apply? It's actually funny to read his statement saying as a Canadian he's obligated to deliberatly ignore the embargo, might be true in Canada but if he's living and working on the other side of the border he's meat for Customs to chew up and spit into jail. Not only that but they are being EXTREMELY lenient on him. He could've served the rest of his life in a maximum security federal prison.
If lower orbits are out, so are almost every military satellite, which includes GPS, and it's international variants. In addition you can kiss the Iridium System goodbye. And I'm sure there are hundreds of other satellites in low earth orbit that people, countries and the militarys of the world find are 100% necessary.
This alone is a death kneel for the entire concept. The 100's of satellites in low earth orbit don't have the booster fuel to be dodging a big flying guillotine in space, even if it only comes around every 5 years.
There will be the typical outcry that it's being proposed to either stop Mexicans from migrating, deprive Latinos work and money (vast chunks of central America and Mexico are now completely dependent on migrant labor money that is sent home) And there will of course be comments from what is typical of ignorant people that call themselves liberal (and aren't).
The fact is immigration reform that removes illegal migrants and eliminates even agricultural migrant's will be good for America in every way. The US economy has moved to a very strong dependence on what can only be called slave labor. Illegal migrants are frequently put in job's that pay less than US minimum wage standards and don't meet US minimum safety standards. There can be no argument that the continual immigration of people to the US helps the American economy, even illegal migration helps, the question is does it help more than controlled immigration does. But the fact is, how illegal workers are treated in this country is akin to the sharecrop system of virtual slavery that developed in the south after the civil war. It's also a fact that eliminating the cheap slave labor will force technological solutions that in the end will generate a significant number of high paying tech jobs.
As citizens we have to decide if we believe in the values we enshrine. If the wholesale exploitation of people to keep fruit and veggy prices low fits with our values. Sure, the migrants will tell you that they love living in America and that they do the hard work so their children have a chance that they wouldn't have in their home countries. Again, we have to ask ourselves, wouldn't it be better to allow REAL immigration instead of speaking out about illegal migration while we turn a blind eye to the illegal migration (US policy for the last 20 years).
How many people do you know that have turned in the local small businesses that are employing illegal migrants and in the process pricing out everyone else that is playing by the rules ?(Construction is by far the worst for this)? Illegal migration artificially deflates labor prices, it's the reason the republican's have used to keep the minimum wage from changing and it's also the reason that some jobs have such low labor rates that no one but illegal migrants can afford the job, thereby providing an excuse to right wing policy makers that the migrants are only taking jobs that American's won't. Without illegal migrants in the equation labor rates would be forced by supply and demand to provide a real living wage.
Initially Y >> X, but the deal requires yearly payments from Novell for basically the remainder of their existence. In the long term X >>>>>> Y. Sure Novell gets a very much needed cash infusion, but long term they sold their soul to the devil. Those yearly payments to Microsoft are going to get very ugly when/if Novell is low on cash again. You don't ever want to trade a large cash settlement for smaller payments with no end date because the day will come when those payments exceed the money received and Microsoft's long term strategy begins to pay substantial cash.
When talking about the deal I haven't seen any comments on the long term payments Novell must make on every copy of Linux distributed. If Novell becomes successful they will be paying a percentage to MS. It's a Win-Win for MS and a lose-lose for Novell.
Back when I was running a very small PC resale business, about 6 years ago, I believe the numbers I saw said white box sales accounted for close to 20% of PC Sales. Now that the aggressive pricing by DELL and other OEM's have driven a significant number of the mom and pop's out of business (including myself)I would wager that number has dropped a bit, but I wouldn't say that US sales of white box's has dropped below 10%, in fact I bet that number is a bit higher. But keep in mind, in the timeframe WGA was created that number was much closer to 20% of sales.
The problem is that a LOT of the white box sellers didn't used to sell genuine copies of windows with their sales. In fact I would bet that the number of white box sellers with pirated copies, because the OS costs often make the computers more expensive than the OEM's, has in fact increased significantly. What would you do if 10-12% of your total business was being lost to unscrupulous sellers? WGA was always implemented as a system to stop the white box sellers who weren't legit, in fact if you buy a PC without a valid license and you turn in the reseller you get a free copy of windows. Microsoft doesn't want to punish innocent victims.
I don't agree with a lot of Microsoft's business practices, but the fact is WGA was created to stop white box sellers who were using pirated copies of windows. The point was to make the purchaser aware of what happened so they will in turn report the reseller and the BSA can drop by and sue them out of existence. WGA has actually been VERY successful at stopping this practice and eliminating the white box sellers who engaged in this practice. It has also had the added benefit of stopping the casual pirate, ie. the guy that buys one copy and installs it on multiple PC's.
I imagine the next version of WGA (the one built into Vista) will be updated with SP1 to Stop pirates as that is the next big frontier for making all Western sales of Windows legit. The reason it wasn't implemented this way originally is because Microsoft thought they made Vista impossible to activate without a genuine license.
I stopped reading when you said communism was an economic system. Blatantly, horribly wrong.
Socialism is an economic system, Communism is a political system. Communism engages in socialism, but every other political system on the planet, including democracy, engages in socialism as well. The distinction between communism and democracy is that communism is created as a system where a small group of self-selected individuals rule the lives of the rest. Typical communist parties have real membership of less than 20% of the population, and decisions making is often less than 5%, typically the party is controlled by small groups of families as well. Leaders are selected within the party ONLY, and obedience to the party is paramount over the needs of the people. No human rights are guaranteed, people are treated as assets and property, rather than people. When communist leaders speak of the importance of the state/people, they are in fact referring to the importance of the continued rule and satisfaction of the party members, and in particular the leadership.
As an example consider China, do you think a single ruling party members lives in remotely the same conditions as the rest of the population? The reality is, that just like Soviet Communism the living standards of the ruling party members far exceeds that of even some of the richest westerners. If the needs of the people were truly the most important as they claim, that wouldn't be true.
Communism is a political system based on totalitarian rule, nothing unique about it. It's disregard for humanity exceeds nearly every other system of politics.
I hope they are ready for the "if they are filtering that, why are't they filtering X" where X = Almost anything someone has their panties in a bunch about. I predict a SHARP rise in subscription losses.
Statistics aren't copyrightable (Supreme court ruling and all that). Otherwise major league baseball would be taking a cut from every fantasy league. Chip counts and such silly things would fall under "statistics". If he convinces some lawyer to sue, the suit will be tossed almost immediately based on the supreme court ruling regarding statistics.
You are obsolutely correct. He is completely free to provide any coverage he wants under our first amendment privlidges and the GOVERNMENT cannot put him jail. (because as you are aware the first amendment ONLY covers the actions of government and the use of the government right to take away civil liberties, or in other words to send people to jail)
Of course the owner of the stadium (and by prescriptive/contractual right the NCAA) also has the right to refuse entry or kick out anyone for any reason.
Funny, both groups exercise their rights independently and you get up in arms and give a big post about how he can violate the stadium owners rights with impunity because it's a first amendment issue. Just remember, you have the right to say whatever you want in a public place, you come in my house and say stuff I don't like and you're leaving, possibly in motion while airborne.
It's usually customs that is involved in counterfeit cases, and counterfeit sales usually nets at least a year in prison. Now you know why the vendors ran without even getting their money.
Not full bibles. They would be forced to buy a chapter or a single verse. Scientology is all about making you pay, and making you pay more to learn more (and dividing that learning up into the smallest possible segments so that they can maximize your "contributions"). That is why they closely guard the copyrights on their material because it is a primary source of revenue. Without it they would have to generate more material that was under copyright to sell and frankly, no one in the organization now has the science fiction credentials to write the religious material like Hubbard did.
Dyanetics is the book Hubbard wrote to recruit. After that there are many many training and learning materials that mainly Hubbard put together before his death. Sure they have generated more training material but without Hubbards creativity they are lacking the kind of Science Fiction writer they would need to continue to generate newer "religious" materials to charge for.
Personally I think everyone should boycott Tom Cruise, John Travolta and the other Scientologist actors as they pump millions into the organization every year and make it more powerful. I know I avoid their movies at all costs where I am contributing finances directly to the actor as I know a good percentage of that revenue ends up in Scientology coffers.
It would have honestly not mattered if you had or hadn't with godaddy involved. Your domain is likely up for auction right now. Godaddy is terribly unscrupulous, but they don't make a secret of their domain stealing activities, it's right in their TOS.
Do you know why there is a scapegoat? Because in America if the one committing the crime dies, they have to find someone else to punish. The media response is simply a reflection of the general attitudes of the community. You might not agree by 9 times out of 10 what the media does is reinforce the strongest idea circulating at the time. The media is partially the problem, if real journalism existed such lambasting of a innocent people wouldn't happen, but the fact is the problem is with everyone, not just the media. I can't tell you the number of people I heard making comments about how the school didn't do enough (and I live in the rocky mountains), how many of the parents and "community activists" sought to blame the school, the administration or the courts.
It seems to be a culture in America that developed in the 80's that someone has to go to jail or loose their job when tragedies happen. If the criminal in question commits suicide (and thus atones for the crime) the American people often demand another sacrifice, and the press runs right along with it. Hell the parents of the shooter HAD to apologize for the behavior of their ADULT son. I thought America was a country where you didn't answer for the crimes of relatives, but that clearly changed in the 80's.
As someone who not only has been discharged from fairly major surgery, including an angiogram of the brain and eye surgery that involved entering the brain cavity, and dealt with the problems of getting other loved ones out of complicated medical situations, I think I can say affirmatively when getting someone discharged the top priority is keeping things comfortable and sane for the discharged patient. It can do more harm to the person you love to make them wait 4 hours while you argue with nurses who clearly don't know what is going on (usually because they just started their shift and they never worked with the patient, or because they simply can't read the doctors handwriting on the chart), or can't be understood.
In fact a wait of that long in a situation like that could result in life threatening complications as heart surgery often involves the use of blood thinners and home dosage is either done by self injection or pills which are not monitored as closely as the heparin solutions given through IV. It's critically important that when discharging a patient the information does NOT need to be requested and in fact it should all be preprinted waiting for the pickup. This is standard practice in EVERY other hospital in the US. Bad information leads to malpractice suits, and not having a policy on information provided at discharge, or not following that policy can lead to VERY very expensive negligence or malpractice lawsuits.
If I were a shareholder of KP I would be livid after reading all this information. The company is clearly mismanaged and if it's not corrected immediately the entire company is at risk, not just from overspending of a change in cashflow, but lawsuits as this information release gives ambulance chaser lawyers significant basis for suit. Loss of information tied to implementation of a digital system that is inferior to the prior system and doesn't meet industry standards for availability (Healthcare IIRC has a standard of 99.9999% availability at most organizations with down times of less than 30 minutes) or accuracy is a major lawsuit waiting to happen. All you need is someone that has critical complications that disables them permanently or a death which can be tied to information availability and you have a multi billion dollar negligence, incompetence and malpractice suit. If there are any lawyers of the type mentioned above reading Slashdot they are likely salivating and are considering commercials on TV to find clients.
Typical Euro-trash babbling. America is doomed! Doomed I say! Yet America still sustains a minimum of 3-4% GDP growth per year. Far in excess of the 1% in Europe. America also has employment rates that are near full. In fact 11 million illegal migrant workers wouldn't be here if the jobs weren't here. Yet in Europe the age group of 18-30 has unemployment of nearly 20%!! And country wide unemployment near 10-12% depending on which euro-trash country you are looking at. Racial segregation is a dividing force and has led to race riots. Something America hasn't seen since the 1960's. Europe also faces rashes of Islamic terrorism with large minorities of disaffected and unemployed Muslim youth. Whereas in the US the Muslim community is prosperous and nearly fully integrated into the US. France has more debt as a percentage of GDP than the US has, France and Germany both fail to meet the minimum debt/spending standards for the EU every single year.
With climbing unemployment, no growth, stagnant to declining economies, high susceptibility to the effects of global warming and a unrest population with poor integration of immigrants on the footstep of a potentially hostile group of people and inadequate defenses to defend even the home country I'd bet Western Europe bit the dust long before the US ever "collapses" as you put it.
The fact is neither Europe nor the US are going anywhere fast. The US has faced challenges the last few years, in particular because of the current administration but if you think it's going to lead to the collapse of the US, or it's economy, you're an ignorant fool.
The Chunnel and Big Dig would share nothing in common with this project. Labor and Materials would be sourced from Asia and far cheaper than US resources. Labor would likely be a combination of Chinese and Russian, and the tunnel isn't being built on the edge of a fully developed city. Everything about this project would be virgin, and virgin construction is often half or less the price of construction where your dealing with property issues and relocations and keeping existing routes open, and that's across the board with the same fixed costs (labor, materials and equipment).
Toss in discounts on materials and labor mentioned above, and leave out the costs of safety measures and then you have a project that could be done at a 10th the cost of European or US construction and that doesn't even include discounts for easier engineering. The Chunnel and Big Dig had serious Geotechnical issues that relied on brand new and expensive concepts to mitigate, for example, the Boston Tunnel isn't under the floor of the ocean, it sits on top. Not only that, but the Big Dig sits in probably the WORST labor market in the US, everything in Union, and by that I mean bad Union where organized crime is still involved. I doubt the bearing straight suffers from the same Geotech issues and it definitely won't suffer the labor issues. Also, the Chunnel had to deal with the fact that England and France are pulling apart at about an inch a year, this tunnel would sit well north of the ring of fire and would be dug through all of one plate.
It's undoubtedly true that given the difficulty in these type of projects due to the unknowns, that you should probably double the costs, but even still the cost to construct will be a fraction per mile of what the Chunnel or Big Dig took. The big question really is who pays for it, because if it's US taxpayers that are supposed to foot the bill so Russia and China can ship stuff here easier then I'm not a big supporter of the idea. If Russia and China each wanted to kick in a third of the cost the project sounds incredibly interesting. Split three ways the project would be very inexpensive in consideration of the benefits.
Want to know the biggest reason to build the tunnel? We could fix the road on the Russian side, and build a road from Anchorage to the states (expensive though that would be, it's not as expensive as you think, building a road on an established roadbed with new bridges isn't terribly expensive, especially when the Russians could build it for almost nothing given they have essentially free oil and the US land side link to Alaska using a full interstate design has already had preliminary engineering done and if I remember right priced in at about 5 billion 3-4 years ago). After completion the US would have direct access to Russian resources, and the Russians would have direct access to US manufactured goods and food stuffs. Not only that but a link from Northern China would not be out of the question. Can you even imagine the benefit of a land line and rail link to China and Russia would mean? Shipping goods across the ocean is risky, time consuming and expensive. Link it all up by rail, especially a high speed rail and you have one of the most amazing commercial links ever constructed. Not only that but at the same time an oil pipeline from Siberia to the mainline US could be constructed. Constructing this would pay for itself in probably a dozen years or less just on the additional commerce that would be possible with Russia and China.
How cool would it be to ride a Train from LA to Shanghai or Moscow?
Lets be clear, none of those conditions would eliminate the possibility of a crossing. Not even putting the bridge right across the fault as we have numerous bridges that cross faults, including the San Andreas fault which is IIRC the most active fault in the world. The problem isn't the engineering, it's the cost. Why would you spend 10-50 billion dollars when a 10 minute ferry ride provides the same service with minimal delay? That's the whole reason the earmark Bridges in Alaska have been criticized so heavily, they replace a 5 minute ferry ride with a 300 million dollar bridge. Part of Transportation planning is realizing when making the improvement just isn't worth the cost, no matter how convenient or nice it would be.
Yes we have those laws to. Is it harassment if you had something stolen and you were suing someone to reclaim the lost property value in Turkey? Cause contrary to what you and many others think about it, Sharing and Downloading of Copyrighted material is illegal in the US, and likely is in Turkey as well. It's not harassment to recover damages using the court system.