I think there's a rite of passage in programming. First, you see a bug and immediately assume your code is right and the compiler is wrong. With a little experience, you learn that it's actually a darn good bet that your code is the thing with the problem. With a lot of experience, you learn that while it's a darn good bet, on rare occasions the compiler really does get it wrong, but that it usually takes a horrendously long, assembly-level debugging session to prove it.
Much the same is true of the standard library that comes with your programming language, or any high quality third party library you use. Some of these are considerably more robust than others, but usually if it's something thousands of projects are using, it's going to be your project code that's wrong rather than the library.
I'm sure there is some considerable overlap between people who (to some degree) pay for music and people who (to some degree) rip it illegally. But I don't think that's the root cause of the problem (or at least, not the only root cause).
The basic problem is that by attacking the pirates, the megacorps have made their products worse even for 100% legitimate users. I am sick and tired of having to sit through unskippable ads at the start of legally purchased DVDs. I am sick and tired of having to wait several seconds while my legally downloaded music track is checked out by some DRM-checking engine. I'm sick and tired of having to jump through hoops to "activate" my legally installed software. I'm not even going near various new toys (I'm looking at you, HD discs and Windows Vista), in large part because I don't trust them not to break and the companies who took my money to leave me hanging after all the horror stories.
Now, sure, part of their problem is that by doing this they make their legal products relatively worse than the illegally ripped versions, rather than equivalent except in price and legality. This no doubt motivates a significant number of people to rip things just to avoid the crap.
But they also make their products worse in absolute terms. Why on earth would I pay the same amount of my money for something that is less pleasant to use than what I used to get? In fact, why would I pay my money at all, when I can use numerous legal alternatives that come without the headaches, even without resorting to copyright infringement? I have a finite budget, and I can find entertainment from perfectly legal sources that don't line the pockets of big media: live music or recordings by independent artists, OSS for software, etc. Does it really matter that I haven't seen the latest blockbuster movie on HD-DVD, or played the latest DirectX 10-enabled game, as long as I'm entertained by what I spend my leisure budget on?
The short answer is no, it doesn't. If the megacorps want me to spend my hard-earned money on their products rather than someone else's, they need to make the better products. This argument has nothing to do with ripped versions of the same products, and everything to do with more pleasant alternative products becoming more widely available.
I think I probably agree with everything you wrote. My concern is that while the Code of Practice may have "legal standing", as you put it, it is not primary legislation. The problem with any secondary legislation is that provisions within it are not debated in the same way in Parliament, and the usual parliamentary safeguards against the administration changing the rules arbitrarily are absent. The Act is the only absolute standard, and if the government decide they want to abuse it, they can just change the Code of Practice on a whim. Thus from the point of view of protecting the people from abuse of bad legislation, a Code of Practice is about as effective as a leaky boat.
I'll see your draft code of practice and raise you the Act itself.
As far as I can see, a notice may be given on the basis of "reasonable grounds" to believe that the key is necessary for carrying out just about any government function (49(2)(b)). Failure to comply with such a notice can result in imprisonment (53(5)). A person is taken to have shown that they didn't have the key if they produce evidence of this and the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt (53(2)).
I see nothing requiring that the person issuing the notice actually demonstrate that either the data or the key exists. They merely need some basis for claiming that it would be useful to have them if they did.
I'm neither a lawyer nor an expert on RIPA, but the same argument does seem to have been made by various civil liberties groups around the time the Act was going through Parliament, and I'm going to assume that they do have lawyers who could grok the fine print.
I suppose it also explains why the US has a much higher per capita murder rate than the UK?
No, wait... Maybe there are other factors involved, and drawing conclusions from isolated data is a bad idea!
In this particular case, my point was that the police here prefer not to distinguish themselves so much from Joe Public. You can very reasonably argue that arming the entire population, police or otherwise, would have a worthwhile deterrent and/or defensive effect. There is ample evidence to support this position from other countries, and indeed from changes in the legal framework during our own history. But arguing for arming vs. not arming is a different thing to arguing for police being heavily armed/armoured and therefore seeming more removed from the average citizen, and it is the latter that I was commenting on.
Whoa, maybe you dont pay attention to politics, but we put people in jail all the time for that.
Unless, of course, they are senior officials, in which case it's perfectly reasonable for them to testify before Congress/Parliamentary committees/whatever your country has that they can't recall the details of anything untoward that the government they represent may or may not ever have considered doing or actually have done, nor any conversations with any other senior officials who might be able to further the investigation if they could be identified. Oh, and they can't tell you their passwords for national security reasons, which means pursuing the matter would make you a threat to national security, so I wouldn't do that if I were you, OK?
Laws like RIPA are on the books in every country because of the fear of a ticking time bomb scenario. No nation wants to be forced to release someone even though they know that on an encrypted hard disk is information on an imminent attack, or after an attack has taken place, have physical possession of something that can tell them of the connections between terrorist cells... and can't do anything with the info.
<sarcasm> Absolutely! In fact, in a world where religious zealots blow themselves up along with their victims in the belief that they'll get a bunch of virgins to play with in heaven, it's hard to imagine how they might not care if a government agency arrested them and threatened to send them to prison for not revealing the details of their plans. </sarcasm>
I assume that you are British. So I would like to know if your tax collectors are armed, the IRS has armed agents yet no one considers them a law enforcement agency. Talk about feudal system tax collectors. do the English tax man have guns or do they have to call a real law enforcement agency?
Here in the UK, most of our police officers don't carry guns. Some specialist units do, but it's not standard practice.
Interestingly, surveys consistently show that most police officers here don't want to carry guns, either. Having the people on your side is a far more valuable weapon, and creating the sort of them-and-us culture where only cops and criminals get the funky toys runs counter to maintaining a good relationship with the local population.
For the avoidance of doubt, there isn't really a "tax man" either: any tax you don't pay would typically be collected directly via your employer, bank, or similar. Even if bailiffs get involved at some stage, they don't (and legally can't) carry guns.
There again, the former British Home Secretary changed the UK law to allow plausible denial when he got bombarded with encrypted files, followed by demands he turn over the decryption key.
Do you have a source to support that claim? Obviously many people suggested that stunt, but I've never seen any indication that it was actually attempted, and certainly no indication that it succeeded in motivating a change in the law. It would be a delicious irony if it had worked, but since only certain officials can require the production of decryption keys, it's hard to see how it could do anything other than make a point, and surely that point had been considered before the draconian law was passed in the first place.
The short answer is yes, if you do that and they bring a case, you could be considered a criminal. If memory serves, you can then be given a harsher sentence than those that could be handed down for actual possession of various types of illegal material, too.
The problem is, the law doesn't seem to place the burden of proof on the prosecution when it comes to showing whether there is or isn't any meaningful data present. Any old bits on a hard drive are (unqualified) electronic data.
On your point about circumstantial evidence, we really need not to set a precedent that says use of encryption can be treated as any sort of evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, that you are storing data of dubious legality. The implications of giving any legal weight to drawing that conclusion are horrible.
The military is the last thing to get cut. Even if their budget were reduced, it would have the capacity to crush China for years, if not decades.
I think a few people here have watched too many political/military thrillers.
Newsflash: Both the US and China have plenty of nukes.
Corollary: The odds of any full-scale military confrontation between the US and China are approximately 1 in $VERY_BIG_NUMBER, regardless of what happens in connection with either Taiwan or the world economy.
You'd probably see a lot of sanctions and lots of important-looking people in tailored suits would talk lots in plush buildings, but it's bordering on implausible that the current regime in either country would actually push the big button. They both know damn well that war between them would force one or other to do so when it got desperate enough.
The "statement" you quoted was part of a sentence, which you've lifted out of context. The only person obsessed with the Ts & Cs here is you. Those don't tell you anything about the real nature of the site and what actually happens. In fact, as I already noted in reply to an earlier post of yours, they don't say anything at all about the problem of friends sharing information about you without your consent, which is what everyone else here is talking about. It seems addressing that factual observation was too much for you, though, and regrettably you resorted to name-calling instead of rational argument in your reply.
Incidentally, no "backpedaling" is necessary. I have since checked, and it still appears to require an account to access any of the content posted on Facebook and thus to see what it's really like. My statement remains as true today as it was when I signed up.
Ah, sorry, I lost a little of the context somewhere. Yes, I completely agree that it matters what you are doing away from work. But I think the only safe presumption is that your employer doesn't get it, and the onus should be on them to show why they have a fair claim to anything they want to include in the contract.
It's reasonable to say an employer can claim anything based on trade secrets that you only have access to because of your employment, for example. It's reasonable to say you can't work on something in competition with them while you're also employed by them. I think there's a grey area around quitting and then immediately competing: I have no ethical problem with someone leaving a company to pursue better ways of doing things, but you obviously can't tell in practice whether the serious thinking about those better ways happened during the employment, so allowing some sort of short term limitation to protect employers seems a reasonable compromise.
There's a related issue which I think is morally hazardous, if an employee has a great idea, they properly disclose it to their employer, and the employer doesn't want to act on it. Since a simple idea isn't worth much until you build on it, I personally don't have a problem with the employee leaving the company and then setting up a competing business to follow up on the idea. I don't see how a simple idea would be protected under any IP laws anyway, and even if it were, I don't like defensive use of IP laws. I don't see why the employer should be entitled to any protection against fair competition or the employee should be restrained from furthering the field if the employer declines to do so. But then you get back into whether the employee only had the idea while working at the employer, or was doing anything to create tangible benefits based on it, for which the employer would then own the IP if there was any. Again, a short cooling off period to protect the employer seems a reasonable compromise.
All in all, in the absence of telepathy, the area is an ethical minefield.:-(
Or it's just a company whose executives have better things to do than read the fine print on whatever generic legal documents their counsel gave them.
If a company has poor legal staff and/or executives who are negligent in how they conduct basic business practices like employment then that's entirely their problem.
Personally, I use this area as one of a small number of "acid tests" whenever I'm considering a potential new employer. There are certain contractual stipulations that count as black marks. If they have any of these in the first contract they show me then unless it's otherwise a spectacularly impressive offer they go to the bottom of the pile, which usually has other offers in it that don't attempt to screw me. Most potential employers will therefore never get a chance to fix that mistake. For those who do, I politely and clearly explain my objections to their terms. If they come back with a document with every objection properly addressed, I'll consider them again. If not, I conclude that their culture is not employee-friendly and bin them permanently. No-one gets a third chance.
If that sounds unreasonable to anyone, please consider that employment is a competitive market place in both directions. Popular employers with many CVs to look at can easily afford to throw away any that look dubious to avoid accidentally hiring a fool, even if it means overlooking a few good people by mistake. Similarly, good employees who will be valuable to an employer can afford to throw away any that might look dubious to avoid risking a lot of grief later, even if it means turning down a workplace that might have been good. Sure, the market occasionally gets so biased in one direction that contract negotiation is bordering on one-sided, but IME this only ever lasts for a few months, perhaps a year or two. Unless you're very young and inexperienced or you've been exceptionally unlucky, you can probably ride out such a bad patch in other ways rather than take on a job with abusive terms.
If you can't live with these kinds of binds at all, you may be unemployable.
Considering the number of people posting here about how they have successfully negotiated such badness away or just outright refused to sign contracts including it, if we assume that these people are not all just making up for apparent reason, it looks like you're mistaken and people like that are readily employable.
They may not be employable by a certain type of large company with poor HR/legal practices, but then from some of those same example posts, that appears to be the large companies shooting themselves in the foot and it's no great loss for the good people turning them down.
In a "thinking" job (as opposed to a "doing" job), it's really hard to prove that you didn't spend any time on it while at work and vice versa.....if your work entails writing software to track stocks and then while at home you write a similar product, even if completely on your own free time with your own personal resources, etc. Don't you think your employer would have some greivance with you?
If it's obviously connected to your employment, that's one thing. However, the typical attempt I've seen basically claims all IPR to anything you do during the period of your employment, regardless of whether it makes any use of your employer's resources or has anything to do with the work you do for them.
Personally, I think it would be best for the entire industry to take collective action by refusing to sign such hostile conditions, or just outright ban them in law (as I believe some jurisdictions already do to some degree). I personally have refused to accept them, and seen action by a group of colleagues when an attempted contract change like this was proposed that saw the company back down. But not everyone is so lucky, and there is simply no ethical reason any employer should be able to claim rights to things you do that have nothing to do with work. "Everyone does it!" and "You're salaried, so all your hours are working hours!" are just cheap cop-outs, which are used to run over the little guy who doesn't know any better.
I'm sorry, I believe you've committed standard Slashdot foolish behaviour #3: not reading a post properly and then launching into a rant about what you thought it said while spectacularly missing the point of what it actually said. Thank you for playing. Please try again later.:-)
Now, if you look carefully, my post was in reply to an implication that the motives of countries other than the US for wanting control must be for censorship purposes. The point I was actually making was that there are other credible explanations. The fact that the US government has a well-documented history of abusing Internet access to gain access to information even in violation of its own laws and constitution is an illustrative example, and the reference to privacy was incidental.
While a number of countries wanting to internationalize Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English, we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it.
Not to be confused, presumably, with a nation whose government has a demonstrated history of violating the privacy rights of its own citizens and stating on the record that it doesn't accord any such rights at all to anyone who isn't one of its own citizens, including the vast numbers of Internet users from other nations whose traffic is all but certain to pass through systems under its jurisdiction, and within which it has repeatedly been shown that major communication providers are more than willing to provide the government with access to traffic they carry without proper authorisation anyway.
Nope, I can't imagine how any other nation in the world could see a problem with that. There is no danger whatsoever of industrial espionage, interception and decoding of confidential government transmissions, or investigations of private citizens of high influence, and none of them could be used to further the interests of a nation with such access at the expense of others anyway.
A "citizen" IMNSHO, would not expect the law to cover them where they themselves have failed in their due diligence.
And you think reading in full and seeking professional legal advice on every binding agreement you ever get presented with, in addition to conducting some arbitrary and unspecified amount of background research to determine how others feel about the product or service you are considering, is reasonable due diligence, do you?
I've got news for you: no-one could actually do it, because it would take more time than most people will ever have, and cost more money than most people will ever have. This is why we have laws that certain basic rights may not be signed away and certain contractual claims are unconscionable, and why we have courts and police services that can be used to seek redress when someone breaks them with a one-sided deal.
I have a very big issue with people who hand out their information freely, or act like fools in public, then crow about privacy violations after the fact.
In case you missed the point, I wasn't handing my information out freely. Facebook was inciting others to hand out information about me that they had.
Some feeble implication that Google solves all the world's problems isn't an argument. It's basically a tacit admission that you don't actually have a cogent argument to make, so you'll try to score points by being a smartass instead.
Does it even occur to you that someone has to go first? What about the people who joined Facebook years ago, when even the service itself barely registered on Google, and the privacy implications weren't widely realised? Certainly my involvement was long before all the recent concern over privacy and critical web sites.
And where on that page does it describe what actually happens?
In particular, where in either the page you cited or the privacy policy does it indicate that by signing up to the service (which you haven't yet seen, other than via those pages of dense legal CYA-speak) you will be inviting and give your permission for Facebook to collect vast amounts of personal data about you but not supplied by you? (Note that having such permission is a legal requirement in some places, though possibly not in the US, which is one way sites like this can start to get into hot water.)
It's fascinating that the privacy policy I linked to these days claims Facebook follows two core principles, of which the first is "You should have control over your personal information." They demonstrably do not really mean this, because they collected vast amounts of personal information without my consent and against my will, and they provide no mechanism for me to make them delete it.
I had a friend, too. In order to cause some general amusement, his best friend eventually just created an account for him... filled with hilarious "details" and pictures about his life. This persisted for a month until he eventually found out about it and that many of his other friends were in on the joke.
It caused the break up of a long-standing friendship, which has never recovered, and put strain on several other relationships affect by the "funny" content and the betrayal of trust.
See, the problem is Facebook, when its basic intent is to get friends to provide information about each other, regardless of whether anyone wants that information made public. People play along, probably quite innocently in most cases, and then before you know it someone goes too far and the damage is done. This is a fundamental problem with many social networking type sites, but Facebook is much worse than most of the others in several key ways.
Slashdot Mirror
At times like this, I am reminded of the 666th rule of acquisition: never choose Microsoft!
I think there's a rite of passage in programming. First, you see a bug and immediately assume your code is right and the compiler is wrong. With a little experience, you learn that it's actually a darn good bet that your code is the thing with the problem. With a lot of experience, you learn that while it's a darn good bet, on rare occasions the compiler really does get it wrong, but that it usually takes a horrendously long, assembly-level debugging session to prove it.
Much the same is true of the standard library that comes with your programming language, or any high quality third party library you use. Some of these are considerably more robust than others, but usually if it's something thousands of projects are using, it's going to be your project code that's wrong rather than the library.
I'm sure there is some considerable overlap between people who (to some degree) pay for music and people who (to some degree) rip it illegally. But I don't think that's the root cause of the problem (or at least, not the only root cause).
The basic problem is that by attacking the pirates, the megacorps have made their products worse even for 100% legitimate users. I am sick and tired of having to sit through unskippable ads at the start of legally purchased DVDs. I am sick and tired of having to wait several seconds while my legally downloaded music track is checked out by some DRM-checking engine. I'm sick and tired of having to jump through hoops to "activate" my legally installed software. I'm not even going near various new toys (I'm looking at you, HD discs and Windows Vista), in large part because I don't trust them not to break and the companies who took my money to leave me hanging after all the horror stories.
Now, sure, part of their problem is that by doing this they make their legal products relatively worse than the illegally ripped versions, rather than equivalent except in price and legality. This no doubt motivates a significant number of people to rip things just to avoid the crap.
But they also make their products worse in absolute terms. Why on earth would I pay the same amount of my money for something that is less pleasant to use than what I used to get? In fact, why would I pay my money at all, when I can use numerous legal alternatives that come without the headaches, even without resorting to copyright infringement? I have a finite budget, and I can find entertainment from perfectly legal sources that don't line the pockets of big media: live music or recordings by independent artists, OSS for software, etc. Does it really matter that I haven't seen the latest blockbuster movie on HD-DVD, or played the latest DirectX 10-enabled game, as long as I'm entertained by what I spend my leisure budget on?
The short answer is no, it doesn't. If the megacorps want me to spend my hard-earned money on their products rather than someone else's, they need to make the better products. This argument has nothing to do with ripped versions of the same products, and everything to do with more pleasant alternative products becoming more widely available.
I think I probably agree with everything you wrote. My concern is that while the Code of Practice may have "legal standing", as you put it, it is not primary legislation. The problem with any secondary legislation is that provisions within it are not debated in the same way in Parliament, and the usual parliamentary safeguards against the administration changing the rules arbitrarily are absent. The Act is the only absolute standard, and if the government decide they want to abuse it, they can just change the Code of Practice on a whim. Thus from the point of view of protecting the people from abuse of bad legislation, a Code of Practice is about as effective as a leaky boat.
I'll see your draft code of practice and raise you the Act itself.
As far as I can see, a notice may be given on the basis of "reasonable grounds" to believe that the key is necessary for carrying out just about any government function (49(2)(b)). Failure to comply with such a notice can result in imprisonment (53(5)). A person is taken to have shown that they didn't have the key if they produce evidence of this and the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt (53(2)).
I see nothing requiring that the person issuing the notice actually demonstrate that either the data or the key exists. They merely need some basis for claiming that it would be useful to have them if they did.
I'm neither a lawyer nor an expert on RIPA, but the same argument does seem to have been made by various civil liberties groups around the time the Act was going through Parliament, and I'm going to assume that they do have lawyers who could grok the fine print.
I suppose it also explains why the US has a much higher per capita murder rate than the UK?
No, wait... Maybe there are other factors involved, and drawing conclusions from isolated data is a bad idea!
In this particular case, my point was that the police here prefer not to distinguish themselves so much from Joe Public. You can very reasonably argue that arming the entire population, police or otherwise, would have a worthwhile deterrent and/or defensive effect. There is ample evidence to support this position from other countries, and indeed from changes in the legal framework during our own history. But arguing for arming vs. not arming is a different thing to arguing for police being heavily armed/armoured and therefore seeming more removed from the average citizen, and it is the latter that I was commenting on.
With the amount of sh*t most governments produce, I'd go with sanitation. It's an enlightened self-interest thing...
Whoa, maybe you dont pay attention to politics, but we put people in jail all the time for that.
Unless, of course, they are senior officials, in which case it's perfectly reasonable for them to testify before Congress/Parliamentary committees/whatever your country has that they can't recall the details of anything untoward that the government they represent may or may not ever have considered doing or actually have done, nor any conversations with any other senior officials who might be able to further the investigation if they could be identified. Oh, and they can't tell you their passwords for national security reasons, which means pursuing the matter would make you a threat to national security, so I wouldn't do that if I were you, OK?
Laws like RIPA are on the books in every country because of the fear of a ticking time bomb scenario. No nation wants to be forced to release someone even though they know that on an encrypted hard disk is information on an imminent attack, or after an attack has taken place, have physical possession of something that can tell them of the connections between terrorist cells... and can't do anything with the info.
<sarcasm> Absolutely! In fact, in a world where religious zealots blow themselves up along with their victims in the belief that they'll get a bunch of virgins to play with in heaven, it's hard to imagine how they might not care if a government agency arrested them and threatened to send them to prison for not revealing the details of their plans. </sarcasm>
I assume that you are British. So I would like to know if your tax collectors are armed, the IRS has armed agents yet no one considers them a law enforcement agency. Talk about feudal system tax collectors. do the English tax man have guns or do they have to call a real law enforcement agency?
Here in the UK, most of our police officers don't carry guns. Some specialist units do, but it's not standard practice.
Interestingly, surveys consistently show that most police officers here don't want to carry guns, either. Having the people on your side is a far more valuable weapon, and creating the sort of them-and-us culture where only cops and criminals get the funky toys runs counter to maintaining a good relationship with the local population.
For the avoidance of doubt, there isn't really a "tax man" either: any tax you don't pay would typically be collected directly via your employer, bank, or similar. Even if bailiffs get involved at some stage, they don't (and legally can't) carry guns.
There again, the former British Home Secretary changed the UK law to allow plausible denial when he got bombarded with encrypted files, followed by demands he turn over the decryption key.
Do you have a source to support that claim? Obviously many people suggested that stunt, but I've never seen any indication that it was actually attempted, and certainly no indication that it succeeded in motivating a change in the law. It would be a delicious irony if it had worked, but since only certain officials can require the production of decryption keys, it's hard to see how it could do anything other than make a point, and surely that point had been considered before the draconian law was passed in the first place.
The short answer is yes, if you do that and they bring a case, you could be considered a criminal. If memory serves, you can then be given a harsher sentence than those that could be handed down for actual possession of various types of illegal material, too.
The problem is, the law doesn't seem to place the burden of proof on the prosecution when it comes to showing whether there is or isn't any meaningful data present. Any old bits on a hard drive are (unqualified) electronic data.
On your point about circumstantial evidence, we really need not to set a precedent that says use of encryption can be treated as any sort of evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, that you are storing data of dubious legality. The implications of giving any legal weight to drawing that conclusion are horrible.
The military is the last thing to get cut. Even if their budget were reduced, it would have the capacity to crush China for years, if not decades.
I think a few people here have watched too many political/military thrillers.
Newsflash: Both the US and China have plenty of nukes.
Corollary: The odds of any full-scale military confrontation between the US and China are approximately 1 in $VERY_BIG_NUMBER, regardless of what happens in connection with either Taiwan or the world economy.
You'd probably see a lot of sanctions and lots of important-looking people in tailored suits would talk lots in plush buildings, but it's bordering on implausible that the current regime in either country would actually push the big button. They both know damn well that war between them would force one or other to do so when it got desperate enough.
How about a nice game of chess? :-)
The "statement" you quoted was part of a sentence, which you've lifted out of context. The only person obsessed with the Ts & Cs here is you. Those don't tell you anything about the real nature of the site and what actually happens. In fact, as I already noted in reply to an earlier post of yours, they don't say anything at all about the problem of friends sharing information about you without your consent, which is what everyone else here is talking about. It seems addressing that factual observation was too much for you, though, and regrettably you resorted to name-calling instead of rational argument in your reply.
Incidentally, no "backpedaling" is necessary. I have since checked, and it still appears to require an account to access any of the content posted on Facebook and thus to see what it's really like. My statement remains as true today as it was when I signed up.
Ah, sorry, I lost a little of the context somewhere. Yes, I completely agree that it matters what you are doing away from work. But I think the only safe presumption is that your employer doesn't get it, and the onus should be on them to show why they have a fair claim to anything they want to include in the contract.
It's reasonable to say an employer can claim anything based on trade secrets that you only have access to because of your employment, for example. It's reasonable to say you can't work on something in competition with them while you're also employed by them. I think there's a grey area around quitting and then immediately competing: I have no ethical problem with someone leaving a company to pursue better ways of doing things, but you obviously can't tell in practice whether the serious thinking about those better ways happened during the employment, so allowing some sort of short term limitation to protect employers seems a reasonable compromise.
There's a related issue which I think is morally hazardous, if an employee has a great idea, they properly disclose it to their employer, and the employer doesn't want to act on it. Since a simple idea isn't worth much until you build on it, I personally don't have a problem with the employee leaving the company and then setting up a competing business to follow up on the idea. I don't see how a simple idea would be protected under any IP laws anyway, and even if it were, I don't like defensive use of IP laws. I don't see why the employer should be entitled to any protection against fair competition or the employee should be restrained from furthering the field if the employer declines to do so. But then you get back into whether the employee only had the idea while working at the employer, or was doing anything to create tangible benefits based on it, for which the employer would then own the IP if there was any. Again, a short cooling off period to protect the employer seems a reasonable compromise.
All in all, in the absence of telepathy, the area is an ethical minefield. :-(
Or it's just a company whose executives have better things to do than read the fine print on whatever generic legal documents their counsel gave them.
If a company has poor legal staff and/or executives who are negligent in how they conduct basic business practices like employment then that's entirely their problem.
Personally, I use this area as one of a small number of "acid tests" whenever I'm considering a potential new employer. There are certain contractual stipulations that count as black marks. If they have any of these in the first contract they show me then unless it's otherwise a spectacularly impressive offer they go to the bottom of the pile, which usually has other offers in it that don't attempt to screw me. Most potential employers will therefore never get a chance to fix that mistake. For those who do, I politely and clearly explain my objections to their terms. If they come back with a document with every objection properly addressed, I'll consider them again. If not, I conclude that their culture is not employee-friendly and bin them permanently. No-one gets a third chance.
If that sounds unreasonable to anyone, please consider that employment is a competitive market place in both directions. Popular employers with many CVs to look at can easily afford to throw away any that look dubious to avoid accidentally hiring a fool, even if it means overlooking a few good people by mistake. Similarly, good employees who will be valuable to an employer can afford to throw away any that might look dubious to avoid risking a lot of grief later, even if it means turning down a workplace that might have been good. Sure, the market occasionally gets so biased in one direction that contract negotiation is bordering on one-sided, but IME this only ever lasts for a few months, perhaps a year or two. Unless you're very young and inexperienced or you've been exceptionally unlucky, you can probably ride out such a bad patch in other ways rather than take on a job with abusive terms.
If you can't live with these kinds of binds at all, you may be unemployable.
Considering the number of people posting here about how they have successfully negotiated such badness away or just outright refused to sign contracts including it, if we assume that these people are not all just making up for apparent reason, it looks like you're mistaken and people like that are readily employable.
They may not be employable by a certain type of large company with poor HR/legal practices, but then from some of those same example posts, that appears to be the large companies shooting themselves in the foot and it's no great loss for the good people turning them down.
In a "thinking" job (as opposed to a "doing" job), it's really hard to prove that you didn't spend any time on it while at work and vice versa.....if your work entails writing software to track stocks and then while at home you write a similar product, even if completely on your own free time with your own personal resources, etc. Don't you think your employer would have some greivance with you?
If it's obviously connected to your employment, that's one thing. However, the typical attempt I've seen basically claims all IPR to anything you do during the period of your employment, regardless of whether it makes any use of your employer's resources or has anything to do with the work you do for them.
Personally, I think it would be best for the entire industry to take collective action by refusing to sign such hostile conditions, or just outright ban them in law (as I believe some jurisdictions already do to some degree). I personally have refused to accept them, and seen action by a group of colleagues when an attempted contract change like this was proposed that saw the company back down. But not everyone is so lucky, and there is simply no ethical reason any employer should be able to claim rights to things you do that have nothing to do with work. "Everyone does it!" and "You're salaried, so all your hours are working hours!" are just cheap cop-outs, which are used to run over the little guy who doesn't know any better.
I'm sorry, I believe you've committed standard Slashdot foolish behaviour #3: not reading a post properly and then launching into a rant about what you thought it said while spectacularly missing the point of what it actually said. Thank you for playing. Please try again later. :-)
Now, if you look carefully, my post was in reply to an implication that the motives of countries other than the US for wanting control must be for censorship purposes. The point I was actually making was that there are other credible explanations. The fact that the US government has a well-documented history of abusing Internet access to gain access to information even in violation of its own laws and constitution is an illustrative example, and the reference to privacy was incidental.
While a number of countries wanting to internationalize Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English, we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it.
Not to be confused, presumably, with a nation whose government has a demonstrated history of violating the privacy rights of its own citizens and stating on the record that it doesn't accord any such rights at all to anyone who isn't one of its own citizens, including the vast numbers of Internet users from other nations whose traffic is all but certain to pass through systems under its jurisdiction, and within which it has repeatedly been shown that major communication providers are more than willing to provide the government with access to traffic they carry without proper authorisation anyway.
Nope, I can't imagine how any other nation in the world could see a problem with that. There is no danger whatsoever of industrial espionage, interception and decoding of confidential government transmissions, or investigations of private citizens of high influence, and none of them could be used to further the interests of a nation with such access at the expense of others anyway.
A "citizen" IMNSHO, would not expect the law to cover them where they themselves have failed in their due diligence.
And you think reading in full and seeking professional legal advice on every binding agreement you ever get presented with, in addition to conducting some arbitrary and unspecified amount of background research to determine how others feel about the product or service you are considering, is reasonable due diligence, do you?
I've got news for you: no-one could actually do it, because it would take more time than most people will ever have, and cost more money than most people will ever have. This is why we have laws that certain basic rights may not be signed away and certain contractual claims are unconscionable, and why we have courts and police services that can be used to seek redress when someone breaks them with a one-sided deal.
I have a very big issue with people who hand out their information freely, or act like fools in public, then crow about privacy violations after the fact.
In case you missed the point, I wasn't handing my information out freely. Facebook was inciting others to hand out information about me that they had.
Some feeble implication that Google solves all the world's problems isn't an argument. It's basically a tacit admission that you don't actually have a cogent argument to make, so you'll try to score points by being a smartass instead.
Does it even occur to you that someone has to go first? What about the people who joined Facebook years ago, when even the service itself barely registered on Google, and the privacy implications weren't widely realised? Certainly my involvement was long before all the recent concern over privacy and critical web sites.
And where on that page does it describe what actually happens?
In particular, where in either the page you cited or the privacy policy does it indicate that by signing up to the service (which you haven't yet seen, other than via those pages of dense legal CYA-speak) you will be inviting and give your permission for Facebook to collect vast amounts of personal data about you but not supplied by you? (Note that having such permission is a legal requirement in some places, though possibly not in the US, which is one way sites like this can start to get into hot water.)
It's fascinating that the privacy policy I linked to these days claims Facebook follows two core principles, of which the first is "You should have control over your personal information." They demonstrably do not really mean this, because they collected vast amounts of personal information without my consent and against my will, and they provide no mechanism for me to make them delete it.
I had a friend, too. In order to cause some general amusement, his best friend eventually just created an account for him... filled with hilarious "details" and pictures about his life. This persisted for a month until he eventually found out about it and that many of his other friends were in on the joke.
It caused the break up of a long-standing friendship, which has never recovered, and put strain on several other relationships affect by the "funny" content and the betrayal of trust.
See, the problem is Facebook, when its basic intent is to get friends to provide information about each other, regardless of whether anyone wants that information made public. People play along, probably quite innocently in most cases, and then before you know it someone goes too far and the damage is done. This is a fundamental problem with many social networking type sites, but Facebook is much worse than most of the others in several key ways.