In one job I had flexitime, but then we got new management in and tied a 5k GBP pay rise to loosing the flexi. I rejected the pay rise cause I liked the flexibility. They didn't understand why someone would turn down the extra money.
That's impressively naive, even for management. If you'd offered that deal to the guys at my office, I'd be surprised if you got 25% take-up.
Personally, my flexitime and ability to take a half-day or day of leave at short notice are easily worth 5k pounds of salary to me. I'd look for at least double that to justify shifting to a job without those perks.
Ah, the standard assumption that the entire world is beholden to the US Constitution. How quaint.
And the fact that you can't see something doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't there. Viewed as an economic instrument, copyright should be strong enough to promote the creation and distribution of new works. If that means protections that last for a while after the author dies — and there is a legitimate argument that copyright protection should last for a some time after the author's death for "young" works — then so be it. Personally, I suspect that the copyright terms for various media in various places are currently rather excessive, but that's my personal guess and I don't have any research to back it up.
I'd be all for a percentage of whatever revenue the copyright has brought to you the preceeding year.
And how is that different from any other income or capital gain, on which people are typically already taxed in most places? Copyright doesn't bring income, work worth selling does. Copyright is mostly just a way to make sure that work can be sold at a price more people can afford.
Seriously, though... Remember the times when we used to actually create?
As someone who spent much of today suffering a combination of Outlook, Powerpoint and Project rather than my usual helping of Visual Studio and Word... No, my memory of those times seems to have been erased, and replaced only by submission to the fact that all software today is **** together with a slow loss of the will to live.
On the bright side, this all gives me another few years to contemplate my pet "if only I had the time" project of developing actually good, actually useful software that does the sorts of things people working in real offices actually want. I'll be releasing that six months after I've finished designing the programming language to implement it, producing a state of the art IDE and tool set to work with the language, and making my first million training others in how to program it and save themselves years of effort.:-)
I personally would love to have FIOS or some other level of service that would allow me to migrate partially online, but honestly at the rate things are going I don't expect this stuff to gain any momentum anytime soon, at least not in the US.
It's not going to get momentum elsewhere any time soon, either, for the same reason that those ISPs you mentioned are starting to get scared and adopt packet shaping, and that your chances of getting a cell phone line at 12:05am on 1 January are pretty slim: there is this little thing called bandwidth, and it needs to become a great big thing (at a cost of billions of dollars of infrastructure) before the idea of everyone migrating to these on-line apps is even technically credible. And that's just for fixed machines, because physics kinda gets in the way of building new bandwidth for current generation wireless systems.
I suspect that what will gain traction in the next few years is web-style applications hosted locally within companies, so IT have a standard set-up they can manage centrally and new users can just connect and start work. This is only a step removed from using web interfaces to databases and such, which is already commonplace for much the same reason. It's not things like Google Apps hosted by Google that Microsoft has to fear; it's things like Google Apps hosted on major businesses' own servers, so it doesn't even matter which OS their clients are running.
He's an elected Member of Parliament, and supported by a majority in the Commons, which makes him Prime Minister.
Yes it does, but it doesn't give him any sort of popular mandate to act for the people of this country.
He could be turfed out tomorrow if he loses a motion of confidence, and parlimentary elections MUST take place by 2011.
He could be turfed out if MPs kicked him out in a vote of no confidence, but those MPs have a vested interest in not forcing such a vote since it will most likely be damaging to their careers. As for elections, I submit that any system where someone can become leader of a nation without a public vote and then enjoy that authority without any possibility of public accountability for nearly four years is far from democratic or representative. It's just another one of those handy average-of-averages political systems where the guys in power get to keep tweaking the rules so they stay in power longer, even when a substantial majority of the electorate wish otherwise.
OK, the first past the post system can throw out some weird results, and Labour does happen to get the best of them. Sixteen years of Tory government hints that this isn't a huge issue however.
On the contrary. The fact that we had sixteen years of Tory rule breaking things one way, to the point where Labour won a landslide and then we had a decade of them breaking things another way, to me says that this very much is a huge issue. There has to be some sort of balance in practical politics, and a never-ending "boom and bust" cycle — though which is which depends on your political views — where policies constantly flip-flop isn't really in the long-term interests of anyone.
I know how the system works. I am simply claiming that it does not lead to representative government with a legitimate mandate to act on behalf of the electorate, and that in this respect the current situation in the UK is no better than the various unsavoury regimes mentioned in this discussion.
I'd accept your argument if people voted for their local MP in their own right, but most people don't. Instead, they vote for the candidate put forward by a particular political party because of the party affiliation, and the choice of party by the voter is greatly influenced by the leadership in place, as indeed are the policies of the party at that time.
In other words, while officially we vote for MPs, in practice almost everyone votes for a certain party. Claiming otherwise is like claiming Labour have a mandate because all those Labour MPs got in, even though they're doing things that most of the population don't support and a substantial majority of the population who voted at the past election opted for parties who don't support those actions. The rules say that Labour can do those things anyway, but that just demonstrates that the rules are broken.
Yeah, I can't help but remember how Gordon Brown seized power in a military coup and allowed a leading member of the opposition to be brutally assassinated by extremists.
Brown didn't have to seize power in a military coup, as our entirely undemocratic electoral system gave it to him anyway. No-one ever voted for him or his administration, other than whatever internal politics may have happened within his party. His predecessor was elected on one of the smallest proportions of the popular vote in history, and even then it was on the basis of a clear promise that he would serve a full term (and therefore that people were explicitly not voting for a party that would have Brown as leader before the next general election). And yet, despite all of this, Brown now commands an absolute majority in Parliament.
As for assassination, we don't do that sort of thing yet. Well, unless you get on the Tube, anyway. Then it's OK for the police to shoot you, and face no real consequences. We don't silence government critics, either. Unless you're a long-standing member of the party and Holocaust survivor with the audacity to shout a one-word heckle during your party conference, in which case you must be removed by several heavies and then barred from re-entering as a terrorist threat. But don't worry, if you keep your head down you'll be fine. Unless someone mistakes your mobile phone for a gun, in which case you'll be arrested at gunpoint and have a permanent record placed on file of not only your DNA but also the fact that you were suspected of a firearms offence so if the police ever visit you in future they'll come with guns every time. Fortunately, we have the IPCC to challenge the police when they do abuse their authority, and the effectiveness of that particular check on the power of the elite is clearly demonstrated by the way 100 of their legal team just resigned in protest at the absurd incompetence/corruption in the organisation's leadership. Anyway, those records are just another precaution the government need to take, like wanting the DNA of every citizen on file. That solved a couple of murders this week! And it's never abused, and mistakes are never made with data. Unless you're one of 25,000,000 people whose personal data was lost by the child benefit people, say. That was only enough for any identity thief to completely take over someone's life, but don't worry, we have an Information Commissioner to help ensure personal data is properly handled, even if his department is massively underfunded and when he warns about all these problems with the surveillance/database state people nod but nothing changes. And hey, even if that fails, we can just declare an arbitrary state of emergency, at which point the law says the government can restrict freedom of movement and association, confiscate property without compensation, and all sorts of other things in violation of what we used to call basic human rights.
So no, it's not really a free country we live in. The state can and has killed people, silenced critics, and instituted quite literally the most privacy-invading surveillance regime in the world. There is way too much summary justice and far too few checks and balances that still carry any real weight if you find yourself on the wrong side of the system because someone made a mistake. And neither the political leaders nor their instruments in the police and security services have any real accountability to the people for any of it. The only difference between the current regime in the UK and some of the more obviously abusive ones in other countries is one of scale.
For whatever it's worth, some of us in the UK do still care about democracy, privacy, freedom and the like. But the kind of principled leadership that once led to fighting the good fight and establishing basic laws in the interests of justice such as those you mentioned has been sadly lacking of late. Until we can get rid of the current wave of unrepresentative politics,
Sir, I'm sure the 25 million people in the UK whose child benefit records were lost all agree with you, sir!
The really insidious thing about something like that is that it's almost impossible to prove that harm came from it. Anecdotal evidence might suggest that if such data did fall into criminal hands then a significant number of those people will now be victims of identity theft or some related crime. Past experience might suggest that given the high value the criminal world would place on such a rich source of data, they will have taken steps to acquire it. But can anyone prove it? Probably not.
And what that means is that while the government who screwed up can publicly wash their hands and cry "no harm, no foul", the reality is that 25,000,000 people with nothing to hide now have something to fear.
My experience has been rather different. I've investigated local photographers a few times now for family shots in studio, weddings, and the like. Many of them used to try to retain rights to everything a few years ago, but market forces have pretty much killed that since things went digital. After all, no-one wants to pay a fortune for a wedding set and then get told they can't give copies to friends and family!
Instead, the pricing model has changed. You used to pay very little for the photographer to turn up/studio time, but quite a bit for the prints. Now, you can get just prints for a token fee and full rights for not much more, but the rate for turning up in the first place reflects the time and resource costs for the photographer, i.e., it's a lot more than it used to be. I guess wherever you are the market just hasn't caught up yet, but I can't see how it won't since other photographers will offer what you want for a similar fee.
Seriously, if you actually believe there should be laws against "copying other people's ideas" then there is no hope for you.
And if you actually believe that copyright protects other people's ideas, then there isn't much hope for you, either. For a guy who seems to be responsible for about every other post in this discussion about copyright, you're pretty uninformed about what copyright is.
Streaming multimedia content has always been pitched as the killer app for home user broadband, and many ISPs have actively marketed their so-called "up to 8MB" services on the basis of their ability to support such applications.
These organisations have been raking in the profits by over-advertising what they were able to provide realistically and over-subscribing people at very profitable rates, and now it's payback time: the market has been trained to expect that for a certain price, a certain service is viable, and in future they will want the service they've been paying for all along.
Now, the bigger ISPs with economies of scale to be had, and the smaller ones who have always been honest about charging higher prices but offering more sustainable contention ratios, will be fine. Organisations like PlusNet, who turned into one of the worst ISPs in the UK having been one of the best, are now doomed by their own poor management: they have failed to plan to provide the service advertised, and the market will no longer accept a substandard service while still paying the same rates. Instead, people will move to alternative services who have handled things better.
This phenomenon is called "competition", and it's good for everyone except crappy service providers. As a former PlusNet customer (how'd you guess?), I consider this karmic revenge for charging me premium prices and making it unreasonably difficult to switch services, and then having a service that was out for days at a time or ran like a 56K modem.
As others have mentioned, there are various laws that can invalidate some or all of a contract, for example if it is unconscionable. Of course, this is like a reasonableness test: it's unwise to bank on it too readily, as in most cases it's subject to interpretation.
To give a relevant example: when I installed my legally purchased copy of Crysis the other day, I was presented with a licence agreement a full 70 (seventy) screen pages long. The final section relates to the PunkBuster anti-cheat software, which is installed by default, and contains text that pretty bluntly says you accept that they will be scanning your entire system and can copy whatever data they like off it even if this might be regarded as invasive, and you have no guarantees in return. Personally, I think that is completely unreasonable and should be held unconscionable. However, there is no guarantee that the law will agree with me, unless there's been a test case I haven't heard about.
The more interesting question is how an EULA can possibly form a contract in the first place. For a contract to exist, there must be something in it for both parties. Once you've paid up and taken the box home (a simple contract of sale with the vendor), you now have a legitimate copy of the software, and there are certain provisions in European law that say you are allowed to make copies necessary for the normal operation of that software without further permission (though the UK implementation of these is rather incomplete, and I don't know enough about the legal technicalities to know which takes precedence). If the European law dominates, then there is literally nothing in it for the user, so why would a contract exist that imposes any further obligations on them? Then we get into product activation and technical measures, which in turn leads to a debate about planned obsolescence, anti-DRM laws, fitness for purpose of the product sold at the store, etc. Those issues start to go beyond simple copyright and contract law, of course.
I don't get how they could have, since copyright law specifically states that copies made as part of the normal course of operation of a piece of software (i.e. from disk to memory) aren't violations.
Whose copyright law says that?
As far as I'm aware, there is still this dubious legal situation in the UK where the relevant European-level agreements carry such a waiver, but the UK implementation of the corresponding law accidentally forgot that innocuous-seeming little detail. I agree, though, that if that "oversight" were fixed it's hard to see how any consideration is moving in the direction of the user and thus why they would have any obligations under any contract with the copyright holder once they have obtained a legitimate copy of the software to install.
*you had a contract with the store, in which case the product did not meet ordinary merchantability standards i.e. it would not work without imposing other obligations not present at the time of the contract, in which case you can void the contract
Part of the problem here is that in the UK, while you have some protections if you buy something that comes in a box, the general legislation (basically the Sale of Goods Act) may not apply to downloads that are purely electronic in nature because of some legal loopholes. It's not clear that under those circumstances there is any requirement of merchantability, suitability for a particular purpose, or similar.
Yep, advertising doesn't work if almost everyone ignores it. That's why I get so little spam these days.
The sad thing is, they don't need much of a click-through rate to "justify" this sort of intrusion. There's very little marginal cost to them for operating the system, and even if only 1 in 1,000 people is a sucker, that's still a lot of suckers when you multiply the proportion by the size of the web-browsing population.
ISPs should be forbidden from altering the data stream unless they own the content that's being transferred.
IMHO, ISPs should be forbidden from even snooping on your data stream. They've no more business monitoring your on-line activities than the Royal Mail has opening all your letters.
The data protection implications of this development are alarming, and frankly I don't care what some big accounting firm says about them. The day my ISP (which is not one of the three mentioned) says it will adopt a similar policy will be the day that I start the process of moving elsewhere, and I'd probably send a letter to the Information Commissioner expressing my concern as well.
But hey, if the ISPs are spying on where I go and what I do (actually, they're legally required to record it anyway these days — another draconian privacy invasion, this time mandated by our terrorist-fearing government) and acting on the data they have, presumably that absolves them of any immunity they might otherwise have had when they supply files to copyright infringers, kiddie porn to sickos, and the like. May the money-grabbing lawsuits and company-killing PR sink them quickly.
What's with the attacks on credibility? The point the GP made was perfectly reasonable, and you have said nothing to counter it in this post.
I don't see your problem here. On Windows, I have probably half a dozen applications that I allow to routinely check for updates. When one is released, pretty much all of them pop up a single dialog asking me to confirm that I want to download/install it, or just get on with it where I've configured them to do so.
I fail to see how this is any more hard work than playing around with apt-get and the like or prompting to install missing software/updates on Linux.
Well if your going to get all accurate about it, pirates sail the high seas, attack and board vessels and pillage the contents.
/me sighs.
The word "pirate" has been used in the current context since long before modern computers even existed, as any etymological dictionary will tell you.
You're pretty much completely wrong on the knee-jerk arguments about fair use as well, in almost any jurisdiction in the West.
Please at least do some basic fact checking before you post a smart-ass response, particularly if you're going to criticise people for not being "all accurate about it"!
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In one job I had flexitime, but then we got new management in and tied a 5k GBP pay rise to loosing the flexi. I rejected the pay rise cause I liked the flexibility. They didn't understand why someone would turn down the extra money.
That's impressively naive, even for management. If you'd offered that deal to the guys at my office, I'd be surprised if you got 25% take-up.
Personally, my flexitime and ability to take a half-day or day of leave at short notice are easily worth 5k pounds of salary to me. I'd look for at least double that to justify shifting to a job without those perks.
FWIW, that's essentially the same as what happens in the UK, too.
Ah, the standard assumption that the entire world is beholden to the US Constitution. How quaint.
And the fact that you can't see something doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't there. Viewed as an economic instrument, copyright should be strong enough to promote the creation and distribution of new works. If that means protections that last for a while after the author dies — and there is a legitimate argument that copyright protection should last for a some time after the author's death for "young" works — then so be it. Personally, I suspect that the copyright terms for various media in various places are currently rather excessive, but that's my personal guess and I don't have any research to back it up.
I'd be all for a percentage of whatever revenue the copyright has brought to you the preceeding year.
And how is that different from any other income or capital gain, on which people are typically already taxed in most places? Copyright doesn't bring income, work worth selling does. Copyright is mostly just a way to make sure that work can be sold at a price more people can afford.
Seriously, though... Remember the times when we used to actually create?
As someone who spent much of today suffering a combination of Outlook, Powerpoint and Project rather than my usual helping of Visual Studio and Word... No, my memory of those times seems to have been erased, and replaced only by submission to the fact that all software today is **** together with a slow loss of the will to live.
On the bright side, this all gives me another few years to contemplate my pet "if only I had the time" project of developing actually good, actually useful software that does the sorts of things people working in real offices actually want. I'll be releasing that six months after I've finished designing the programming language to implement it, producing a state of the art IDE and tool set to work with the language, and making my first million training others in how to program it and save themselves years of effort. :-)
I personally would love to have FIOS or some other level of service that would allow me to migrate partially online, but honestly at the rate things are going I don't expect this stuff to gain any momentum anytime soon, at least not in the US.
It's not going to get momentum elsewhere any time soon, either, for the same reason that those ISPs you mentioned are starting to get scared and adopt packet shaping, and that your chances of getting a cell phone line at 12:05am on 1 January are pretty slim: there is this little thing called bandwidth, and it needs to become a great big thing (at a cost of billions of dollars of infrastructure) before the idea of everyone migrating to these on-line apps is even technically credible. And that's just for fixed machines, because physics kinda gets in the way of building new bandwidth for current generation wireless systems.
I suspect that what will gain traction in the next few years is web-style applications hosted locally within companies, so IT have a standard set-up they can manage centrally and new users can just connect and start work. This is only a step removed from using web interfaces to databases and such, which is already commonplace for much the same reason. It's not things like Google Apps hosted by Google that Microsoft has to fear; it's things like Google Apps hosted on major businesses' own servers, so it doesn't even matter which OS their clients are running.
He's an elected Member of Parliament, and supported by a majority in the Commons, which makes him Prime Minister.
Yes it does, but it doesn't give him any sort of popular mandate to act for the people of this country.
He could be turfed out tomorrow if he loses a motion of confidence, and parlimentary elections MUST take place by 2011.
He could be turfed out if MPs kicked him out in a vote of no confidence, but those MPs have a vested interest in not forcing such a vote since it will most likely be damaging to their careers. As for elections, I submit that any system where someone can become leader of a nation without a public vote and then enjoy that authority without any possibility of public accountability for nearly four years is far from democratic or representative. It's just another one of those handy average-of-averages political systems where the guys in power get to keep tweaking the rules so they stay in power longer, even when a substantial majority of the electorate wish otherwise.
OK, the first past the post system can throw out some weird results, and Labour does happen to get the best of them. Sixteen years of Tory government hints that this isn't a huge issue however.
On the contrary. The fact that we had sixteen years of Tory rule breaking things one way, to the point where Labour won a landslide and then we had a decade of them breaking things another way, to me says that this very much is a huge issue. There has to be some sort of balance in practical politics, and a never-ending "boom and bust" cycle — though which is which depends on your political views — where policies constantly flip-flop isn't really in the long-term interests of anyone.
I know how the system works. I am simply claiming that it does not lead to representative government with a legitimate mandate to act on behalf of the electorate, and that in this respect the current situation in the UK is no better than the various unsavoury regimes mentioned in this discussion.
I'd accept your argument if people voted for their local MP in their own right, but most people don't. Instead, they vote for the candidate put forward by a particular political party because of the party affiliation, and the choice of party by the voter is greatly influenced by the leadership in place, as indeed are the policies of the party at that time.
In other words, while officially we vote for MPs, in practice almost everyone votes for a certain party. Claiming otherwise is like claiming Labour have a mandate because all those Labour MPs got in, even though they're doing things that most of the population don't support and a substantial majority of the population who voted at the past election opted for parties who don't support those actions. The rules say that Labour can do those things anyway, but that just demonstrates that the rules are broken.
Yeah, I can't help but remember how Gordon Brown seized power in a military coup and allowed a leading member of the opposition to be brutally assassinated by extremists.
Brown didn't have to seize power in a military coup, as our entirely undemocratic electoral system gave it to him anyway. No-one ever voted for him or his administration, other than whatever internal politics may have happened within his party. His predecessor was elected on one of the smallest proportions of the popular vote in history, and even then it was on the basis of a clear promise that he would serve a full term (and therefore that people were explicitly not voting for a party that would have Brown as leader before the next general election). And yet, despite all of this, Brown now commands an absolute majority in Parliament.
As for assassination, we don't do that sort of thing yet. Well, unless you get on the Tube, anyway. Then it's OK for the police to shoot you, and face no real consequences. We don't silence government critics, either. Unless you're a long-standing member of the party and Holocaust survivor with the audacity to shout a one-word heckle during your party conference, in which case you must be removed by several heavies and then barred from re-entering as a terrorist threat. But don't worry, if you keep your head down you'll be fine. Unless someone mistakes your mobile phone for a gun, in which case you'll be arrested at gunpoint and have a permanent record placed on file of not only your DNA but also the fact that you were suspected of a firearms offence so if the police ever visit you in future they'll come with guns every time. Fortunately, we have the IPCC to challenge the police when they do abuse their authority, and the effectiveness of that particular check on the power of the elite is clearly demonstrated by the way 100 of their legal team just resigned in protest at the absurd incompetence/corruption in the organisation's leadership. Anyway, those records are just another precaution the government need to take, like wanting the DNA of every citizen on file. That solved a couple of murders this week! And it's never abused, and mistakes are never made with data. Unless you're one of 25,000,000 people whose personal data was lost by the child benefit people, say. That was only enough for any identity thief to completely take over someone's life, but don't worry, we have an Information Commissioner to help ensure personal data is properly handled, even if his department is massively underfunded and when he warns about all these problems with the surveillance/database state people nod but nothing changes. And hey, even if that fails, we can just declare an arbitrary state of emergency, at which point the law says the government can restrict freedom of movement and association, confiscate property without compensation, and all sorts of other things in violation of what we used to call basic human rights.
So no, it's not really a free country we live in. The state can and has killed people, silenced critics, and instituted quite literally the most privacy-invading surveillance regime in the world. There is way too much summary justice and far too few checks and balances that still carry any real weight if you find yourself on the wrong side of the system because someone made a mistake. And neither the political leaders nor their instruments in the police and security services have any real accountability to the people for any of it. The only difference between the current regime in the UK and some of the more obviously abusive ones in other countries is one of scale.
For whatever it's worth, some of us in the UK do still care about democracy, privacy, freedom and the like. But the kind of principled leadership that once led to fighting the good fight and establishing basic laws in the interests of justice such as those you mentioned has been sadly lacking of late. Until we can get rid of the current wave of unrepresentative politics,
Sir, I'm sure the 25 million people in the UK whose child benefit records were lost all agree with you, sir!
The really insidious thing about something like that is that it's almost impossible to prove that harm came from it. Anecdotal evidence might suggest that if such data did fall into criminal hands then a significant number of those people will now be victims of identity theft or some related crime. Past experience might suggest that given the high value the criminal world would place on such a rich source of data, they will have taken steps to acquire it. But can anyone prove it? Probably not.
And what that means is that while the government who screwed up can publicly wash their hands and cry "no harm, no foul", the reality is that 25,000,000 people with nothing to hide now have something to fear.
My experience has been rather different. I've investigated local photographers a few times now for family shots in studio, weddings, and the like. Many of them used to try to retain rights to everything a few years ago, but market forces have pretty much killed that since things went digital. After all, no-one wants to pay a fortune for a wedding set and then get told they can't give copies to friends and family!
Instead, the pricing model has changed. You used to pay very little for the photographer to turn up/studio time, but quite a bit for the prints. Now, you can get just prints for a token fee and full rights for not much more, but the rate for turning up in the first place reflects the time and resource costs for the photographer, i.e., it's a lot more than it used to be. I guess wherever you are the market just hasn't caught up yet, but I can't see how it won't since other photographers will offer what you want for a similar fee.
Seriously, if you actually believe there should be laws against "copying other people's ideas" then there is no hope for you.
And if you actually believe that copyright protects other people's ideas, then there isn't much hope for you, either. For a guy who seems to be responsible for about every other post in this discussion about copyright, you're pretty uninformed about what copyright is.
Streaming multimedia content has always been pitched as the killer app for home user broadband, and many ISPs have actively marketed their so-called "up to 8MB" services on the basis of their ability to support such applications.
These organisations have been raking in the profits by over-advertising what they were able to provide realistically and over-subscribing people at very profitable rates, and now it's payback time: the market has been trained to expect that for a certain price, a certain service is viable, and in future they will want the service they've been paying for all along.
Now, the bigger ISPs with economies of scale to be had, and the smaller ones who have always been honest about charging higher prices but offering more sustainable contention ratios, will be fine. Organisations like PlusNet, who turned into one of the worst ISPs in the UK having been one of the best, are now doomed by their own poor management: they have failed to plan to provide the service advertised, and the market will no longer accept a substandard service while still paying the same rates. Instead, people will move to alternative services who have handled things better.
This phenomenon is called "competition", and it's good for everyone except crappy service providers. As a former PlusNet customer (how'd you guess?), I consider this karmic revenge for charging me premium prices and making it unreasonably difficult to switch services, and then having a service that was out for days at a time or ran like a 56K modem.
I might have clicked 'I agree' but that carries no legal weight, at least in the UK. They need my signature.
Are you claiming that no contract can be formed in the UK without a signature?
Or are you aware of some statute or case law that says simply clicking "I agree" isn't enough?
OK, that's great, but this story is about the UK.
Contract's a contract...
Yes and no.
As others have mentioned, there are various laws that can invalidate some or all of a contract, for example if it is unconscionable. Of course, this is like a reasonableness test: it's unwise to bank on it too readily, as in most cases it's subject to interpretation.
To give a relevant example: when I installed my legally purchased copy of Crysis the other day, I was presented with a licence agreement a full 70 (seventy) screen pages long. The final section relates to the PunkBuster anti-cheat software, which is installed by default, and contains text that pretty bluntly says you accept that they will be scanning your entire system and can copy whatever data they like off it even if this might be regarded as invasive, and you have no guarantees in return. Personally, I think that is completely unreasonable and should be held unconscionable. However, there is no guarantee that the law will agree with me, unless there's been a test case I haven't heard about.
The more interesting question is how an EULA can possibly form a contract in the first place. For a contract to exist, there must be something in it for both parties. Once you've paid up and taken the box home (a simple contract of sale with the vendor), you now have a legitimate copy of the software, and there are certain provisions in European law that say you are allowed to make copies necessary for the normal operation of that software without further permission (though the UK implementation of these is rather incomplete, and I don't know enough about the legal technicalities to know which takes precedence). If the European law dominates, then there is literally nothing in it for the user, so why would a contract exist that imposes any further obligations on them? Then we get into product activation and technical measures, which in turn leads to a debate about planned obsolescence, anti-DRM laws, fitness for purpose of the product sold at the store, etc. Those issues start to go beyond simple copyright and contract law, of course.
I don't get how they could have, since copyright law specifically states that copies made as part of the normal course of operation of a piece of software (i.e. from disk to memory) aren't violations.
Whose copyright law says that?
As far as I'm aware, there is still this dubious legal situation in the UK where the relevant European-level agreements carry such a waiver, but the UK implementation of the corresponding law accidentally forgot that innocuous-seeming little detail. I agree, though, that if that "oversight" were fixed it's hard to see how any consideration is moving in the direction of the user and thus why they would have any obligations under any contract with the copyright holder once they have obtained a legitimate copy of the software to install.
The judge should rule that either:
*you had a contract with the store, in which case the product did not meet ordinary merchantability standards i.e. it would not work without imposing other obligations not present at the time of the contract, in which case you can void the contract
Part of the problem here is that in the UK, while you have some protections if you buy something that comes in a box, the general legislation (basically the Sale of Goods Act) may not apply to downloads that are purely electronic in nature because of some legal loopholes. It's not clear that under those circumstances there is any requirement of merchantability, suitability for a particular purpose, or similar.
Yep, advertising doesn't work if almost everyone ignores it. That's why I get so little spam these days.
The sad thing is, they don't need much of a click-through rate to "justify" this sort of intrusion. There's very little marginal cost to them for operating the system, and even if only 1 in 1,000 people is a sucker, that's still a lot of suckers when you multiply the proportion by the size of the web-browsing population.
There are actually very few basic privacy laws in the UK; this is an increasing concern for many people, if media coverage is at all representative.
And actually, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, everyone is already snooping on you. Most people just don't realise it.
ISPs should be forbidden from altering the data stream unless they own the content that's being transferred.
IMHO, ISPs should be forbidden from even snooping on your data stream. They've no more business monitoring your on-line activities than the Royal Mail has opening all your letters.
The data protection implications of this development are alarming, and frankly I don't care what some big accounting firm says about them. The day my ISP (which is not one of the three mentioned) says it will adopt a similar policy will be the day that I start the process of moving elsewhere, and I'd probably send a letter to the Information Commissioner expressing my concern as well.
But hey, if the ISPs are spying on where I go and what I do (actually, they're legally required to record it anyway these days — another draconian privacy invasion, this time mandated by our terrorist-fearing government) and acting on the data they have, presumably that absolves them of any immunity they might otherwise have had when they supply files to copyright infringers, kiddie porn to sickos, and the like. May the money-grabbing lawsuits and company-killing PR sink them quickly.
What's with the attacks on credibility? The point the GP made was perfectly reasonable, and you have said nothing to counter it in this post.
I don't see your problem here. On Windows, I have probably half a dozen applications that I allow to routinely check for updates. When one is released, pretty much all of them pop up a single dialog asking me to confirm that I want to download/install it, or just get on with it where I've configured them to do so.
I fail to see how this is any more hard work than playing around with apt-get and the like or prompting to install missing software/updates on Linux.
Well if your going to get all accurate about it, pirates sail the high seas, attack and board vessels and pillage the contents.
/me sighs.
The word "pirate" has been used in the current context since long before modern computers even existed, as any etymological dictionary will tell you.
You're pretty much completely wrong on the knee-jerk arguments about fair use as well, in almost any jurisdiction in the West.
Please at least do some basic fact checking before you post a smart-ass response, particularly if you're going to criticise people for not being "all accurate about it"!