So, what would happen if we round up 30+ slashdotters and have all of them pillage the rack of razor blades, only to put them all back and pillage some more?
Well, I'm pretty sure I know at least a dozen other/. readers in Cambridge besides myself.;-)
It's a shame Tesco shut five minutes ago. Might have been fun to print out this article and the various comments posted on it, and go have a word with their manager...
Possibly - here, they're demonstrating the ability to link your identity with what you buy, and fairly automatically, en masse. Potentially, this could allow the authorities to track practically every "new" object you bought.
Um... Most of the major supermarket chains in the UK, including Tesco and Sainsburys, have a "loyalty card" scheme that allows them to do just that, in exchange for a small discount on your shopping. These are used to target advertising, adjust product lines according to customer demand, etc. They don't tell you in as many words that this is what the cards are for, but everyone with an ounce of brain matter knows it, no-one really makes a secret of it at the stores, and it seems the vast majority of their customers voluntarily get such a card, supplying the required information in exchange for a discount.
So yes, they can theoretically track every new purchase you make, as long as you use the card with it. That's the whole point. If you don't like that, don't get the card, but the vast majority of people don't seem to care.
I'm curious to know what they gain by this arrangement, though. There are already scanners on the door at that Tesco (my local branch, half a mile from my home) that are supposed to detect anyone walking out with security tagged goods that haven't been paid for, and a security guard by the door. (The same is true of pretty much every major supermarket over here, and most high street clothing stores etc. where there's a big risk of theft.) What does this gain them, a picture if someone manages to get through the alarmed section and past the guard without setting them off? In that case, what if someone else picked up the tagged item, got photographed, and then replaced it on the shelf, prior to a second person stealing them? Oo-er, doesn't sound promising. Maybe I'll just buy my razors from Sainsburys (the other big supermarket, half a mile in the other direction) instead...
But, why then is the *object* code copyrighted? All the knowlege is bound up in the source code, so that code should be passed on too. It is, after all, still the code that is copyrighted, and compiling it is making a derivative work (fine for personal use, not fine for commercial work).
That is a tenuous argument at best.
The principle of copyright is simply that someone who spends time and/or money creating a work based on knowledge and information should be allowed a fair return on their investment.
Unfortunately, if you're going to require that people give away source code in order to secure that return on investment, you're shooting them in the foot. As numerous people have pointed out, open sourcing everything is simply not in the interests of businesses; trade secrets in software techniques would get to competitors, who would rapidly exploit them, thus unfairly disadvantaging whoever did the R&D in the first place.
Thus, unless you're proposing to allow software patents so that people who do invest in R&D can maintain a fair return on investment in spite of opening their source code and revealing their secrets, mandating the distribution of code as source and not executable is a dead idea.
And of course, even if you do, there are other problems with distribution via source alone: you require end users to build their own apps. Picture the support nightmare, if you will... (NB: You can't ship an executable with the source because then that would be redistributable for free and you've basically given up copyright under your scheme.)
So, if we accept that distribution of an executable file alone is the only plausible outcome for much software -- and if you don't accept that, you're living in RMS-Wonderland and not the real world -- then what is the point of having copyright protection over the source if you're going to call a compiled version of the code a "derivative work" and remove it from protection? You've still taken away the ability for the original creator of the work, the guy who put in the effort to make it happen, to gain from his endeavours.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you've thought this through fully, or you're failing to understand why copyright exists and the relationship between the roles of copyright and patents.
So you think that if you walk into a store, knowingly ask for an illegal copy of a CD, which they then go and make at your explicit request, and accept that CD when it's given to you, you're completely innocent? If so, I suspect the legal system would disagree with you.
RMS's argument (as I understand it) is that software is a rigorous description of how to perform some task, and so should not be eligible for copyright.
If that's the case, then he's missing the point.
Non-trivial software is a knowledge/information resource that requires originality and effort to create. In this respect it is no different to books, television programmes, paintings or musical recordings.
Copyright is designed to provide an incentive for skilled people to create such work and receive fair compensation for their labours, because otherwise it could be copied immediately and anyone who invested in creating it could get no return on their investment (be it time, money or whatever else).
This argument applies to software just as much as the other things I mentioned, and thus logically so should copyright.
As you (Anonymous Brave Guy) say, though, the juicial process (at least in so far as their is no jury involved) will probably not give a fig about what anyone's opinion is, and keep enforcing the law, just or unjust.
Of course they will; that is their job, and it would be inappropriate for them to do anything else.
The legislature is what should be taking notice of public opinion and making the laws just. This appears to be where the problem lies in this case, due to various recent pieces of legislation that have been passed in spite of apparently not being in the best interests of either the people as a whole or the principle of copyright.
I'm not saying there's nothing wrong here, but to make things right, you first have to aim at the correct target, and then fire a good enough shot. Most of the Slashbots here chanting that copyright is absurd and everything should be free, or court case results are unfair and should be overturned, aren't even aiming at the correct target.
It's kinda hard to find "case law" on it because no one ever tires to go after the downloader because there is absolutely no case against the downloader.
That's one possibility. Another is that they want to go after the source because that prevents further distribution and acts as a better incentive to others.
It's also much easier to identify and prove a case against an uploader than a downloader.
Only the uploader is capable of creating a copy so only the uploader is capable of infringing.
OK, so if someone cracks a system and as a result a copy of data from that system winds up on the cracker's hard drive, who has made the copy? Someone must have, for a copy has been created. It can hardly have been the sysop given that they weren't involved (at least voluntarily). That doesn't leave many options.
Extortion by any other name still reeks to high heaven (with apologies to William).
How is that extortion? They feel they've been damaged, and they want redress. So they write to the people they feel have damaged them asking for that redress, and if that's refused, they go to court. Where's the unfairness in that?
There may well be a problem here, probably in the fact that defending such a court action would be likely to cost those doing so even if they won, but the problem isn't the "extortion" of writing to demand payment of damages believed due prior to taking court action.
Fortunately, there is a grey area between the extremes you describe.
Often, laws are written using words like "reasonable", as in, you may use "reasonable force" to protect yourself and your loved ones when threatened. What is reasonable under specific circumstances is left for a court case to decide, typically by the opinion of a jury, which is about as representative of general standards as the legal system can get.
In this case, it would seem fair that if you download an illegal copy of a file, but do so in good faith, you might be asked to delete the copy but should suffer no penalty. However, if you could/should (tricky choice) reasonably have known that the copy you were downloading was illegal, you become liable under the rules.
Now, to me, the above would seem a reasonable basis for legislation in the Internet age. You require people to be reasonable (for example, if you're downloading a brand new album, you might reasonably expect it to be subject to copyright and illegal to download unless, for example, the band's home page says you can do so) and do not punish those who are. If a court decides you weren't, you get to pay the damages. Alas, the legal system is so far behind the real world in this area now that everybody is trying to go to extremes and overcompensate. Oops.:-(
In other words, EULAs are not black and white, and the decisions depend on circumstances. I rather suspect that copyright infringement cases should be the same; do you think a P2P network almost entirely used to propagate new free software distros and abused by a couple of people to move illegally copied MP3s should be treated the same way as a P2P network knowingly being used to move illegally copied MP3s almost every time it's used, with the occasional legal download the exception?
I couldn't agree more with everything you've said. It is vital that people consider the law, form their own opinions on its correctness, and advocate change where they feel it is appropriate. This is exactly how bad law should be fixed.
However, this must be done with due respect for the law as it currently stands, and thus for the decisions made in courts. Without that respect, neither current law nor any changes to it are relevant, and that's a bad place to go.
Court said so, which means that legally, it is true essentially by definition, unless and until overturned by a higher court.
Ultimately, somebody has to decide whether things are true or not where there is a difference of opinion, and has to decide what constitutes a reasonable and fair outcome to those involved in a disagreement. That is why we have a legislature and a judiciary. And in spite of the dubious motivations influencing your legislature at present, do you have a better idea?
First of all, why is illegal to make songs available for download? There are legitimate reasons copyrighted material could be made available for download.
Sure, and there are legitimate reasons for P2P that don't involve illegally trading material subject to copyright. But everyone knows (and I defy anyone to claim otherwise) that the vast, vast majority of P2P use if for this purpose. Contrary to what many here may believe, the courts aren't stupid or naive. If a technology is being abused by 99.99% of its users, they're not going to accept "But it has legitimate uses!" as a black and white defence without something a bit more convincing to back it up.
Second, isn't it legal for me to download music if I already own it? For example, I have quite a few record albums. Let's say I get a hankering for ELO's Time. I have it on vinyl but I don't have a record player. Can't I seek out and download cuts from that album legally?
I would strongly suggest that you don't ask for legal advice on Slashdot. As I've just noted in another post, plenty of people will give you their "informed" opinion, probably modded up to +5 by those who agree with it. Unfortunately, as the EULA fiasco shows, "informed" Slashdot opinion frequently disagrees with the opinion of a court, and guess who wins in that case.:-/
My personal take, from a common sense perspective rather than a legal one, is that if both the source and the sink know damn well that they're involved in making an illegal copy of material, they should both be liable to penalties for copyright infringement. If only one party knows, and the other is innocent, then only the guilty party should be subject to penalties, though the other might be legally compelled to erase any copies they made without knowing. To my mind, fair reasons a party might be innocent include:
they provided the material involuntarily after their server was cracked
they downloaded a file they reasonably believed was legal, perhaps because it was supplied by a local band with a publicised policy of giving it away.
I'd like to think the current legal system reflected that, and I suspect that sooner or later case law will come down to something along these lines. But I certainly wouldn't claim that this is how the law is today, because I don't know, and neither do most other people posting here.
Doesn't this permanent attack of personal rights, erosion of privacy and draconian regulations equate a tiranny?
Um... No.
You have no personal right to break the law. If it were a case of life or death abuse, or someone was in immediate danger of harm, you might have a moral case for taking the law into your own hands, but this is nothing like that. There are processes to advocate changes in the law if you don't like it, and choosing to break the law instead is not an appropriate response.
Your right to privacy is being eroded because you or people like you abused it, and didn't fight hard enough to keep it.
The "draconian" regulations are similarly there because straightforward, more trusting agreements were flouted en masse by a significant fraction of the population.
You brought this upon yourselves, you have no-one to blame but yourselves, and you deserve everything you get. It's a shame that the innocent parties who weren't involved in the widespread abuse get hit with the same thing because of your own social irresponsibility.
It's ok to download any songs. That's not copyright infringement.
This is the fourth or fifth time I've seen someone make this claim here recently. Is there some US case law I'm not aware of that supports the claim? I certainly wouldn't want to bet my life on it looking at basic US copyright law, and many other countries have less permissive "fair use" rights under copyright law than the US offers.
Or is this just an old wives' tale, like "EULAs aren't enforceable, so you can just ignore them"? Plenty of people here would like to believe that, and plenty do at first after reading someone post it here, no doubt in a (+5, Insightful) post. And yet plenty more case law disagrees with them.
You should go read that other article again. The judge ruled that it wasn't extortion. The $3,500 demand letters were sent with legal privilege because they were in connection with litigation, i.e., it wasn't just an idle threat to scare people out of their money.
mIRC and the IRC protocols are too widespread and too basic for them to monitor all of it accurately
Sure, and they'll never go after the little guys using P2P because there are too many of them and it'd clog up the court system. You can break the law with impunity because you'll be below their RADAR. Oh, wait...
It's relatively trivial for them to find out who's using IRC to transfer files around. They probably don't even need to monitor the direct file transfer itself; the set up will do nicely. Suppose you go onto a server, and ask if anyone's got an MP3 of the latest Eminem track. If they have someone there who says yes and you ask them to send it to you, you probably just screwed yourself. If the police can do it in chat rooms to track down scumbags trading kiddie porn, what makes you think the RIAA can't do it to track down music traders?
I never understood why spacecraft need wings if they are operating outside an atmosphere.
Same reason they have them on the AH-64, I guess: gotta have somewhere to hang the firepower...
Mind you, it's all good fun, and the muppet characters like Yoda are cute.
Cute, hmm? Cute, you say? Show you cute, I will.
/me smoothly moves aside robe as light sabre flies effortlessly into... hand, performs Jedi-No-Kata at full speed (defying the laws of physics repeatedly) and, satisfied with his demonstration, nods sagely, takes out his walking stick, and hobbles away.
And muppet like? The very idea that there could be even the slightest, most tenuous connection between the great Yoda and an irritating, pink, fabric pig is just preposterous.
That rocked. It did have quite a few custom pieces, but a lot of it was the original multipurpose stuff, and most of the custom pieces (like the canopies and base sections for the monorail) could be reused in plenty of other ways.
I realise that your reply is tongue-in-cheek, but to address the serious point within it...
So if i had my lawyer friend defend me and agree to pay her TWO MILLION DOLLARS!(tm) [insert evil laugh] for the case and we win and are awarded legal fees, would DTV have to pay us TWO MILLION DOLLARS!(tm) that we could split?
No, probably not. The court would award costs of $x, where they deemed $x to be a reasonable figure for the work done by your legal representative(s) -- which may or may not match exactly what you paid them.
This arrangement is similar to how cases in the UK work, and whaddya know, we don't have anything like the same problem as the US currently does with big corps intimidating results out of people without any basis. I think this is one of the really clear cases where our legal system is better than theirs at present.
My parent post wasn't a troll. It simply points out a blatant flaw in a common argument used by those against the intellectual property framework. How does exposing a major flaw in a common argument constitute trolling? <sigh>
Go on, mod me down as flamebait if it makes you feel better. But I'd rather you posted an informed counterargument and saved your points for somewhere they'd be constructive.
... the people who "successfully" fought this still had to pay their own legal fees.
As I read it, those were in dismissal cases (as opposed to the summary judgement against DirecTV mentioned at the end of the article). Can the victims here bring a countersuit to recover their losses? If not, I guess this is the problem with a legal system that doesn't default to awarding all costs to the unsuccessful party unless the court finds there's a good reason not to.
A group of 7 people filed a suit against them claiming extortion. The judge ruled in favor of DirecTV and awarded DirecTV $100,000 in lawyers fees.
In that particular case, the article also notes, the judge ruled that because the letters were sent in connection with litigation, they were subject to legal privilege. The case is currently being appealed. With one exception, the article doesn't note whether the people concerned did anything like writing to DirecTV before taking them to court in the class action suit.
Incidentally, for anyone else who didn't RTFA, there are also mentions of several innocent users who have successfully fought this, amusingly including a guy whom the judge decided was an unlikely culprit, given that he didn't even own a satellite dish.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm pretty sure I know at least a dozen other /. readers in Cambridge besides myself. ;-)
It's a shame Tesco shut five minutes ago. Might have been fun to print out this article and the various comments posted on it, and go have a word with their manager...
Um... Most of the major supermarket chains in the UK, including Tesco and Sainsburys, have a "loyalty card" scheme that allows them to do just that, in exchange for a small discount on your shopping. These are used to target advertising, adjust product lines according to customer demand, etc. They don't tell you in as many words that this is what the cards are for, but everyone with an ounce of brain matter knows it, no-one really makes a secret of it at the stores, and it seems the vast majority of their customers voluntarily get such a card, supplying the required information in exchange for a discount.
So yes, they can theoretically track every new purchase you make, as long as you use the card with it. That's the whole point. If you don't like that, don't get the card, but the vast majority of people don't seem to care.
I'm curious to know what they gain by this arrangement, though. There are already scanners on the door at that Tesco (my local branch, half a mile from my home) that are supposed to detect anyone walking out with security tagged goods that haven't been paid for, and a security guard by the door. (The same is true of pretty much every major supermarket over here, and most high street clothing stores etc. where there's a big risk of theft.) What does this gain them, a picture if someone manages to get through the alarmed section and past the guard without setting them off? In that case, what if someone else picked up the tagged item, got photographed, and then replaced it on the shelf, prior to a second person stealing them? Oo-er, doesn't sound promising. Maybe I'll just buy my razors from Sainsburys (the other big supermarket, half a mile in the other direction) instead...
That is a tenuous argument at best.
The principle of copyright is simply that someone who spends time and/or money creating a work based on knowledge and information should be allowed a fair return on their investment.
Unfortunately, if you're going to require that people give away source code in order to secure that return on investment, you're shooting them in the foot. As numerous people have pointed out, open sourcing everything is simply not in the interests of businesses; trade secrets in software techniques would get to competitors, who would rapidly exploit them, thus unfairly disadvantaging whoever did the R&D in the first place.
Thus, unless you're proposing to allow software patents so that people who do invest in R&D can maintain a fair return on investment in spite of opening their source code and revealing their secrets, mandating the distribution of code as source and not executable is a dead idea.
And of course, even if you do, there are other problems with distribution via source alone: you require end users to build their own apps. Picture the support nightmare, if you will... (NB: You can't ship an executable with the source because then that would be redistributable for free and you've basically given up copyright under your scheme.)
So, if we accept that distribution of an executable file alone is the only plausible outcome for much software -- and if you don't accept that, you're living in RMS-Wonderland and not the real world -- then what is the point of having copyright protection over the source if you're going to call a compiled version of the code a "derivative work" and remove it from protection? You've still taken away the ability for the original creator of the work, the guy who put in the effort to make it happen, to gain from his endeavours.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you've thought this through fully, or you're failing to understand why copyright exists and the relationship between the roles of copyright and patents.
...Freedom to Innovate? ;-)
So you think that if you walk into a store, knowingly ask for an illegal copy of a CD, which they then go and make at your explicit request, and accept that CD when it's given to you, you're completely innocent? If so, I suspect the legal system would disagree with you.
If that's the case, then he's missing the point.
Non-trivial software is a knowledge/information resource that requires originality and effort to create. In this respect it is no different to books, television programmes, paintings or musical recordings.
Copyright is designed to provide an incentive for skilled people to create such work and receive fair compensation for their labours, because otherwise it could be copied immediately and anyone who invested in creating it could get no return on their investment (be it time, money or whatever else).
This argument applies to software just as much as the other things I mentioned, and thus logically so should copyright.
/me notes that this depends on jurisdiction. It may be so in the US -- I don't know, I'm not a US lawyer -- but it isn't true everywhere.
Of course they will; that is their job, and it would be inappropriate for them to do anything else.
The legislature is what should be taking notice of public opinion and making the laws just. This appears to be where the problem lies in this case, due to various recent pieces of legislation that have been passed in spite of apparently not being in the best interests of either the people as a whole or the principle of copyright.
I'm not saying there's nothing wrong here, but to make things right, you first have to aim at the correct target, and then fire a good enough shot. Most of the Slashbots here chanting that copyright is absurd and everything should be free, or court case results are unfair and should be overturned, aren't even aiming at the correct target.
That's one possibility. Another is that they want to go after the source because that prevents further distribution and acts as a better incentive to others.
It's also much easier to identify and prove a case against an uploader than a downloader.
OK, so if someone cracks a system and as a result a copy of data from that system winds up on the cracker's hard drive, who has made the copy? Someone must have, for a copy has been created. It can hardly have been the sysop given that they weren't involved (at least voluntarily). That doesn't leave many options.
How is that extortion? They feel they've been damaged, and they want redress. So they write to the people they feel have damaged them asking for that redress, and if that's refused, they go to court. Where's the unfairness in that?
There may well be a problem here, probably in the fact that defending such a court action would be likely to cost those doing so even if they won, but the problem isn't the "extortion" of writing to demand payment of damages believed due prior to taking court action.
Fortunately, there is a grey area between the extremes you describe.
Often, laws are written using words like "reasonable", as in, you may use "reasonable force" to protect yourself and your loved ones when threatened. What is reasonable under specific circumstances is left for a court case to decide, typically by the opinion of a jury, which is about as representative of general standards as the legal system can get.
In this case, it would seem fair that if you download an illegal copy of a file, but do so in good faith, you might be asked to delete the copy but should suffer no penalty. However, if you could/should (tricky choice) reasonably have known that the copy you were downloading was illegal, you become liable under the rules.
Now, to me, the above would seem a reasonable basis for legislation in the Internet age. You require people to be reasonable (for example, if you're downloading a brand new album, you might reasonably expect it to be subject to copyright and illegal to download unless, for example, the band's home page says you can do so) and do not punish those who are. If a court decides you weren't, you get to pay the damages. Alas, the legal system is so far behind the real world in this area now that everybody is trying to go to extremes and overcompensate. Oops. :-(
In other words, EULAs are not black and white, and the decisions depend on circumstances. I rather suspect that copyright infringement cases should be the same; do you think a P2P network almost entirely used to propagate new free software distros and abused by a couple of people to move illegally copied MP3s should be treated the same way as a P2P network knowingly being used to move illegally copied MP3s almost every time it's used, with the occasional legal download the exception?
I couldn't agree more with everything you've said. It is vital that people consider the law, form their own opinions on its correctness, and advocate change where they feel it is appropriate. This is exactly how bad law should be fixed.
However, this must be done with due respect for the law as it currently stands, and thus for the decisions made in courts. Without that respect, neither current law nor any changes to it are relevant, and that's a bad place to go.
Court said so, which means that legally, it is true essentially by definition, unless and until overturned by a higher court.
Ultimately, somebody has to decide whether things are true or not where there is a difference of opinion, and has to decide what constitutes a reasonable and fair outcome to those involved in a disagreement. That is why we have a legislature and a judiciary. And in spite of the dubious motivations influencing your legislature at present, do you have a better idea?
Sure, and there are legitimate reasons for P2P that don't involve illegally trading material subject to copyright. But everyone knows (and I defy anyone to claim otherwise) that the vast, vast majority of P2P use if for this purpose. Contrary to what many here may believe, the courts aren't stupid or naive. If a technology is being abused by 99.99% of its users, they're not going to accept "But it has legitimate uses!" as a black and white defence without something a bit more convincing to back it up.
I would strongly suggest that you don't ask for legal advice on Slashdot. As I've just noted in another post, plenty of people will give you their "informed" opinion, probably modded up to +5 by those who agree with it. Unfortunately, as the EULA fiasco shows, "informed" Slashdot opinion frequently disagrees with the opinion of a court, and guess who wins in that case. :-/
My personal take, from a common sense perspective rather than a legal one, is that if both the source and the sink know damn well that they're involved in making an illegal copy of material, they should both be liable to penalties for copyright infringement. If only one party knows, and the other is innocent, then only the guilty party should be subject to penalties, though the other might be legally compelled to erase any copies they made without knowing. To my mind, fair reasons a party might be innocent include:
I'd like to think the current legal system reflected that, and I suspect that sooner or later case law will come down to something along these lines. But I certainly wouldn't claim that this is how the law is today, because I don't know, and neither do most other people posting here.
Um... No.
You have no personal right to break the law. If it were a case of life or death abuse, or someone was in immediate danger of harm, you might have a moral case for taking the law into your own hands, but this is nothing like that. There are processes to advocate changes in the law if you don't like it, and choosing to break the law instead is not an appropriate response.
Your right to privacy is being eroded because you or people like you abused it, and didn't fight hard enough to keep it.
The "draconian" regulations are similarly there because straightforward, more trusting agreements were flouted en masse by a significant fraction of the population.
You brought this upon yourselves, you have no-one to blame but yourselves, and you deserve everything you get. It's a shame that the innocent parties who weren't involved in the widespread abuse get hit with the same thing because of your own social irresponsibility.
This is the fourth or fifth time I've seen someone make this claim here recently. Is there some US case law I'm not aware of that supports the claim? I certainly wouldn't want to bet my life on it looking at basic US copyright law, and many other countries have less permissive "fair use" rights under copyright law than the US offers.
Or is this just an old wives' tale, like "EULAs aren't enforceable, so you can just ignore them"? Plenty of people here would like to believe that, and plenty do at first after reading someone post it here, no doubt in a (+5, Insightful) post. And yet plenty more case law disagrees with them.
You should go read that other article again. The judge ruled that it wasn't extortion. The $3,500 demand letters were sent with legal privilege because they were in connection with litigation, i.e., it wasn't just an idle threat to scare people out of their money.
Sure, and they'll never go after the little guys using P2P because there are too many of them and it'd clog up the court system. You can break the law with impunity because you'll be below their RADAR. Oh, wait...
It's relatively trivial for them to find out who's using IRC to transfer files around. They probably don't even need to monitor the direct file transfer itself; the set up will do nicely. Suppose you go onto a server, and ask if anyone's got an MP3 of the latest Eminem track. If they have someone there who says yes and you ask them to send it to you, you probably just screwed yourself. If the police can do it in chat rooms to track down scumbags trading kiddie porn, what makes you think the RIAA can't do it to track down music traders?
Same reason they have them on the AH-64, I guess: gotta have somewhere to hang the firepower...
Cute, hmm? Cute, you say? Show you cute, I will.
/me smoothly moves aside robe as light sabre flies effortlessly into... hand, performs Jedi-No-Kata at full speed (defying the laws of physics repeatedly) and, satisfied with his demonstration, nods sagely, takes out his walking stick, and hobbles away.
And muppet like? The very idea that there could be even the slightest, most tenuous connection between the great Yoda and an irritating, pink, fabric pig is just preposterous.
...Space station monorail.
That rocked. It did have quite a few custom pieces, but a lot of it was the original multipurpose stuff, and most of the custom pieces (like the canopies and base sections for the monorail) could be reused in plenty of other ways.
</nostalgic> :-)
I realise that your reply is tongue-in-cheek, but to address the serious point within it...
No, probably not. The court would award costs of $x, where they deemed $x to be a reasonable figure for the work done by your legal representative(s) -- which may or may not match exactly what you paid them.
This arrangement is similar to how cases in the UK work, and whaddya know, we don't have anything like the same problem as the US currently does with big corps intimidating results out of people without any basis. I think this is one of the really clear cases where our legal system is better than theirs at present.
My parent post wasn't a troll. It simply points out a blatant flaw in a common argument used by those against the intellectual property framework. How does exposing a major flaw in a common argument constitute trolling? <sigh>
Go on, mod me down as flamebait if it makes you feel better. But I'd rather you posted an informed counterargument and saved your points for somewhere they'd be constructive.
As I read it, those were in dismissal cases (as opposed to the summary judgement against DirecTV mentioned at the end of the article). Can the victims here bring a countersuit to recover their losses? If not, I guess this is the problem with a legal system that doesn't default to awarding all costs to the unsuccessful party unless the court finds there's a good reason not to.
In that particular case, the article also notes, the judge ruled that because the letters were sent in connection with litigation, they were subject to legal privilege. The case is currently being appealed. With one exception, the article doesn't note whether the people concerned did anything like writing to DirecTV before taking them to court in the class action suit.
Incidentally, for anyone else who didn't RTFA, there are also mentions of several innocent users who have successfully fought this, amusingly including a guy whom the judge decided was an unlikely culprit, given that he didn't even own a satellite dish.