What is effectively Windows 7 SP2 is called the Convenience Rollup instead, probably because it avoids complications about extending support dates if a new Service Pack is released, and it's found as KB3125574. See my first post to this discussion for more about how to use it, including installing it without waiting an eternity for Windows Update to get its act together.
For general information, if you're installing a fresh Windows 7 now (starting from SP1, presumably) then it seems by far the fastest way to get a system reasonably well patched is to install the Convenience Rollup (KB3125574) and if necessary its prerequisite (KB3020369) from the Microsoft Update Catalog. That immediately brings you up to somewhere around April 2016 in terms of patch level, and you can download the required files quickly from the Catalog site and then install them locally using WUSA without waiting around for hours while Windows Update does whatever its current broken mess needs to do now. The most recent time I did this was just a few days ago, and after doing that it was then another couple of hours for Windows Update to find the rest and install the remaining security updates, but at least it could be done in an afternoon instead of leaving the new PC overnight and hoping it might have found something by the morning. Spybot Anti-Beacon or some similar tool can still turn off the various telemetry junk that you can't now individually because it's all bundled into the CR update.
Incidentally, for those who would prefer to keep security patching their existing Windows 7 systems but not get anything else, there are reportedly (direct from a Microsoft source) going to be monthly security-only bundles as well, but you'll have to get those from Microsoft Update Catalog manually as well, they won't be advertised or pushed out through Windows Update. So it looks like the new SOP is to turn off Windows Update entirely (as a bonus, you get back that CPU core that's been sitting at 100% running the svchost.exe process containing the Windows Update service for the last few months) and instead just go along and manually download the security bundle each month to install locally.
Of course, Microsoft Update Catalog requires Internet Explorer 6.0 or later and won't run with any of the other modern browsers, but I'll live with using IE to access it if it means I get security-patched but otherwise minimally screwed up Windows 7 machines for another 3 years.
Also, it's been confirmed that this policy will apply to all editions of Windows 7. It's not an Enterprise-only feature and doesn't require the use of WSUS etc. Let's hope they stick to their word on this one.
Well, since this entire discussion is about advocacy by a European consumer rights group, Microsoft having previous trouble to the tune of billions of dollars in fines in Europe is relevant, no?
Microsoft have been fined roughly $2B in Europe for various antitrust-related violations, as well as ultimately being forced to change their software. As far as I'm aware, they are still the recipient of the largest fine of that nature in history.
In the US, at one stage a court even ruled that Microsoft should be broken up because of the nature of their software bundling arrangements, though that was subsequently overturned on appeal.
Numerous sources can be yours for the price of entering "Microsoft antitrust" into the search engine of your choice.
Yes, in some places that is true, but I am talking here about "minor" copyright infringement. If stealing a $1 chocolate bar is criminal theft, I'm suggesting (as a basis for discussion) that perhaps downloading a movie instead of buying a $10 DVD should be criminal copyright infringement, and therefore something that public authorities are responsible for policing in the same way that they would prosecute someone caught stealing a chocolate bar from a store.
You can't force a company to meet your standards unless you can get a court verdict against them, and that's already been tried with Microsoft and it failed.
Erm... Say what? For one thing, Microsoft has lost some of the biggest lawsuits and been subject to some of the most severe penalties in the modern corporate tech sector. For another thing, the issues around their direction with Windows 10 haven't been litigated yet, and the kind of consumer advocacy we're discussing in this very thread is often how that process starts.
OK, I'll take you at your word and ask you this, then: why is insider trading considered a bad thing? It's only acting rationally based on true facts. Regardless of the outcome for the inside trader, no other investor was ever guaranteed any particular value for the shares they hold. The business itself is still there and has still issued the same number of shares. So why has anyone lost out in insider trading, and why does the law prohibit it, in your view?
So if you want to sit around and whine about how bad MS is, go ahead, but it isn't productive and it's annoying.
Strange that you're still posting in this discussion if you find it so annoying. Also strange that you seem to equate everyone's comments here with mere whining, when at least the people I've been reading and debating with seem to be more interested in talking about actions that might usefully be taken in the real world.
The only rational solution, if you don't like the way they're treating you, is to vote with your feet.
Well, no, we could also raise awareness of the issues to put pressure on them to change their behaviour, and if that doesn't work, we could take legal action on various grounds, which is customarily how one enforces one's rights against a business that is misbehaving and refuses to do better.
or 2) you can find a better vendor.
The trouble is, if all anyone ever does it post online about how they'll take their business elsewhere, that doesn't magically create any better vendors to move to. It takes competition in the market place to do that, and part of that competition comes from holding vendors to the standards we require of them in terms of treating their customers fairly and punishing those that do not meet those standards.
The commercial artists who experimented with a low-threshold access to material (by not enforcing copyright) showed us empirical data that this is in fact a more likely explanation of reality.
Really? Most of the experiments I've seen along those lines seem to have found results that were far less positive about people paying for work just out of good nature, and most of the exceptions were situations where the artist was already very well known thanks to earlier work supported by the usual payment model. Did you have any specific examples in mind where that was not the case?
Of course there are always those who will give money to support creative work that they believe in, entirely voluntarily. Charity applies in this sector as in almost any other with worthy goals. But it's a big jump from acknowledging that other forms of funding can be viable and useful in some cases to arguing that the copyright-backed model doesn't generate substantial extra revenues over relying on charity or other alternative models alone.
Where in the anti-trust trial was the part about deceiving users into installing a completely different operating system from the one they thought they were getting, even if they actively didn't want it? Either I missed that minor detail, or you're just making stuff up to support a poor attempt at trolling.
They didn't decline to use Windows in the first place.
What does that have to do with the price of fish? Obviously no-one purchasing Windows 7 back in 2010 knew what the situation would be today, nor did they necessarily give any consent to anything Microsoft today might do unless it was clearly part of their contract of sale. For that matter, someone who purchased a new PC with Windows 7 installed last week presumably wasn't expecting or asking for that PC to be "upgraded" immediately to Windows 10 instead. (You did realise that Windows 7 PCs are just about still available from OEMs today, right?)
Windows Update is an integral part of the OS, and the only way to get security updates, so of course they can also use it to sneak in stuff you don't want.
That may be true technically, but it's far from true legally. That's why they could be in trouble now.
Also, keep in mind that security updates necessarily imply that the original product was defective. The main reason big software companies get away with not being sued all the time for shipping defective products and the damage caused by those defects is that as long as there is a reasonable culture of ongoing support, in particular fixing serious defects such as security vulnerabilities for free and in timely fashion, there is a happy if somewhat informal understanding. Microsoft have long published the lengths of time they commit to giving that support for as part of their lifecycle documentation, and their customers have made purchasing decisions based on that public information. They don't get to go back on that now without taking the consequences, nor does any practical need for them to provide security patches somehow imply that they have permission to do anything else using the same technical mechanisms.
Again, if you don't like the way Microsoft treats you as a customer, stop buying their products.
Perhaps a lot of people already did, but that in no way affects what they are entitled to in connection with any purchases they already made.
Not in much of the world, no. As far as I'm aware, the US is alone in offering such staggering punitive damages in this context. The US also has an everyone-pays legal system, allowing for rather transparent barratry in various copyright-related actions, so it's not as if the legal system there being heavily stacked in favour of wealthy rightsholders is surprising. Fortunately, most of the world is not the litigious absurdity that the US is in these respects.
Apparently your country has very different fraud laws to a lot of places, then, because in many countries serious fraud is a criminal act that often carries heavy penalties.
Also, can you really not see any parallel between insider trading (someone exploits the system for personal gain at the expense of other investors who lose out on money they were expected to have but for that exploitation) and copyright infringement? Seriously?
The unauthorized access was easy to avoid - turn off updates.
If the user didn't intend to authorise it, there's a strong argument that is was unauthorised. If the user actively attempted to avoid it, for example by cancelling out of dialogs in a way that would normally cause no further action to be taken, that's a very strong argument that it was unauthorised.
The burden of proof would fall on Microsoft to show that it was authorised, but a lot of the arguments they might try to make would be easily undermined at this point by direct and obvious comparisons with techniques used by malware that everyone would agree was unauthorised.
They will also argue that the maximum liability is set at $5 for the original OS, and Windows 10 is just an OS update, so the liability terms haven't changed.
Well, we're talking about the UK, so I'm betting that the maximum liability was not set at $5. In any case, consumer protection laws are relatively strong here, so terms like that could well be unenforceable.
Which?, or one of their staff, should take Microsoft to court if they got hit with the update.
They don't have to. This is Which? we're talking about. They'll probably be taking it up directly with Trading Standards and possibly other government representatives, all of whom will no doubt have received complaints already from other sources as well. And those government authorities will then be in a position to take direct action against Microsoft if they find it appropriate.
If they don't like Microsoft's business practices, then they should stop using Microsoft products. Otherwise, they should shut up and stop complaining.
That seems a weak argument when we're talking about people who did try to decline the update to Windows 10 but wound up getting it anyway.
True, but don't underestimate the power of Which?. They have a high profile, and when these guys speak, the media pays attention. This could bring an ugly issue for Microsoft to much wider public and therefore political awareness than any number of geeks calling Microsoft out for it in their geeky online forums.
Also, it's not token compensation Microsoft has to worry about in this situation, even though such compensation might wind up outweighing any near-future benefits from the big GWX campaign financially. The real problem they're going to have is if someone wins a suit against them for consequential losses and whatever weasel words they have in their legalese don't get them out of it, opening the floodgates to thousands or even millions or similar claims. Well, that or actual criminal charges for unauthorised access to computer systems, given that clearly a lot of people believed they had declined the update but then had it installed anyway. Given that we have quite strong consumer protection laws here in the UK, I wouldn't consider either of those possibilities out of the question unless a real lawyer can explain why those rules clearly couldn't apply here.
You're ignoring many kinds of fraud, particularly all the ones that involve deceptive practices such as misleading insurance sales or insider trading. In such cases, frequently no-one has literally lost money that was previously in their bank account, yet the law makes reasonable assumptions about future money that should have been in their bank account if the normal economic and legal rules were followed.
The business model is failing and the damage is hypothetical only if you disregard all those pesky principles of law and economics that the whole system depends on. The trouble is, if everyone discarded those principles the same way, then by your argument there would still be no damage done, yet in practice the whole system would collapse and many of those works would no longer be produced.
What insane compensation demands? Almost no-one, at least in my country, is being sued for large amounts of money for copyright infringement, even if they've ripped thousands of pounds' worth of content. Unless you're actually running a major piracy site or large-scale DVD cloning farm or something like that, your chances of suffering any penalty under the law for copyright infringement are extremely low. That's the point.
Unfortunately, we've wound up with a system where enough people are honest and pay for content that some of it is commercially viable to create, yet those honest people are effectively subsidising the freeloaders who benefit from the same content without contributing anything to support it.
Then to address the freeloaders we've wound up with a kind of pseudo-enforcement system through the likes of takedown notices and DRM. From the point of view of Big Media, these moderate the perceived damage from copyright infringement. But in the process they again hurt honest customers, who have to put with crap like unskippable content on their disks, or seeing perfectly legal parody content removed from sites like YouTube, or having their new game keep crashing because the DRM servers are overloaded on launch day.
Basically, because of the lack of effective enforcement through normal legal means, we now have an alternative system that hits legitimate customers not once but twice. I don't see how that is a good thing.
Of course, that alternative system is probably also less effective from the rightsholder's point of view. While that may not get in the way of Hollywood making next year's summer blockbusters that will bring in a fortune anyway, it can be a very different story for an individual artist or small business when their original content gets ripped and shared, and it really can send those businesses under.
You keep writing "imaginary financial damages", which is begging the question. The economic damage from copyright infringement may be difficult to quantify exactly -- no-one sensible is arguing that everyone who infringes would really have bought everything they copied illegally if the infringement were somehow prevented -- but the idea that copyright infringement causes no significant damage is silly. The damage is no more imaginary than the damage from fraud because the money was just 1s and 0s in a bank's computer.
Also, you keep coming back to this idea of crazily disproportionate financial penalties, but in reality those penalties have hardly ever been awarded. Moreover, the criminal laws so often criticised as excessive by anti-copyright campaigners, while varying by jurisdiction, tend to be aimed squarely at professional infringers who are making a lot of money at the expense of legitimate rightsholders (and, incidentally, clearly demonstrating an actual loss to those rightsholders, since the customers duped into buying the illegal rips demonstrably were willing to pay real money for the works in question). Again, I think large scale fraud is a better analogy than anything to do with theft at that point.
Obviously legal systems differ from place to place, but in my country civil suits can normally only result in compensation for actual losses. In a defamation suit, if say a celebrity loses a lucrative sponsorship deal after an libelous allegation that they take illegal drugs, the court might take the value of that sponsorship deal into account when determining those losses. That means a big pay-out, usually enough to justify the cost of bringing a civil legal action. However, in the case of say a single individual copying a single DVD that they could otherwise have bought from Amazon for £10, the people who made that DVD have no mechanism for effectively enforcing their legal rights, because the costs are prohibitive relative to recovering probably less than £10 of actual loss.
The difference in practice is that defamation suits tend to be one-offs and if there has been serious damage as a result it's typically all addressed in a single case against a single other party or a small number of related other parties. Copyright infringement, while overall it too could represent a lot of financial damage, is death by a thousand cuts, and it's not practical under our system to exercise your legal rights against each individual infringer. For related reasons, a serial infringer who rips off many rightsholders by a small amount each time may benefit greatly overall, yet may effectively be immune to any sort of penalty from any of them because there's no mechanism to combine any resulting legal actions to make them cost-effective.
Just to be clear, I have absolutely nothing against individuals and private charities doing good work. I donate to some of those charities myself, and long may they continue.
But equally, as a taxpayer, I have nothing against my government using (for example) military personnel and equipment who are trained and able to operate in harsh environments to support rescue and relief operations in areas hit by natural disasters. There is little that I personally can contribute in such an environment other than financial and moral support, because I don't personally own any large transport aircraft or have enough first aid skills to treat seriously injured people with minimal resources for an extended period because the real hospital just got knocked down by a tsunami. If my own friends or family were in such a situation, I would be grateful to anyone else who offered emergency aid, and so I am happy that the resources I contribute to through taxes can sometimes do that for others.
As for taxes, I personally like paying taxes. As a wise man once said, in return I get civilization.
I always feel like that saying misses out the middle step. In reality, in return for taxation you get authorities with more power than you individually have. How much civilization you get depends on the nature of those authorities and how they wield that power, hence another old saying about accepting no taxation without representation.
Getting back to the matter at hand, apparently this is a silly situation that is against the interests of the local residents and yet benefits no-one. On the other hand, the principle of protecting states' rights that seems to have been behind the court decision here is a reasonable one.
If it's also the case that the service here is funded by local government from tax money but is offering its services to those who aren't local voters/taxpayers, then the principle that the locals shouldn't be required to subsidise it through their own taxation isn't entirely unreasonable either. However, this argument seems much more shaky if those local authorities do in fact have the support of their electorate/taxpayers. After all, our national governments typically make international aid payments or use national resources to send assistance to other parts of the world after natural disasters, and a lot of us have no problem with that even though it's (a tiny part of) our tax money that is funding it. We feel like helping others in these situations is simply the right thing to do, and our governments are better able to do it than individual citizens.
That aside, is there a better way to set up this local Internet access, legally speaking, so that a useful practical arrangement can continue without risking a conflict with any fundamental principles of how the government is constituted?
I'm not arguing that the current copyright rules aren't excessive in some (perhaps most or all) jurisdictions today. On the contrary, I would be the first to agree that they are and that copyright should be brought back to a reasonable level that is justified as an incentive but does not go excessively far beyond that.
However, that is a different point to whether infringement of reasonable copyright protection should be treated as a criminal matter to allow effective enforcement, which is my "devil's advocate" proposition here.
Slashdot Mirror
What is effectively Windows 7 SP2 is called the Convenience Rollup instead, probably because it avoids complications about extending support dates if a new Service Pack is released, and it's found as KB3125574. See my first post to this discussion for more about how to use it, including installing it without waiting an eternity for Windows Update to get its act together.
For general information, if you're installing a fresh Windows 7 now (starting from SP1, presumably) then it seems by far the fastest way to get a system reasonably well patched is to install the Convenience Rollup (KB3125574) and if necessary its prerequisite (KB3020369) from the Microsoft Update Catalog. That immediately brings you up to somewhere around April 2016 in terms of patch level, and you can download the required files quickly from the Catalog site and then install them locally using WUSA without waiting around for hours while Windows Update does whatever its current broken mess needs to do now. The most recent time I did this was just a few days ago, and after doing that it was then another couple of hours for Windows Update to find the rest and install the remaining security updates, but at least it could be done in an afternoon instead of leaving the new PC overnight and hoping it might have found something by the morning. Spybot Anti-Beacon or some similar tool can still turn off the various telemetry junk that you can't now individually because it's all bundled into the CR update.
Incidentally, for those who would prefer to keep security patching their existing Windows 7 systems but not get anything else, there are reportedly (direct from a Microsoft source) going to be monthly security-only bundles as well, but you'll have to get those from Microsoft Update Catalog manually as well, they won't be advertised or pushed out through Windows Update. So it looks like the new SOP is to turn off Windows Update entirely (as a bonus, you get back that CPU core that's been sitting at 100% running the svchost.exe process containing the Windows Update service for the last few months) and instead just go along and manually download the security bundle each month to install locally.
Of course, Microsoft Update Catalog requires Internet Explorer 6.0 or later and won't run with any of the other modern browsers, but I'll live with using IE to access it if it means I get security-patched but otherwise minimally screwed up Windows 7 machines for another 3 years.
Also, it's been confirmed that this policy will apply to all editions of Windows 7. It's not an Enterprise-only feature and doesn't require the use of WSUS etc. Let's hope they stick to their word on this one.
Well, since this entire discussion is about advocacy by a European consumer rights group, Microsoft having previous trouble to the tune of billions of dollars in fines in Europe is relevant, no?
Microsoft have been fined roughly $2B in Europe for various antitrust-related violations, as well as ultimately being forced to change their software. As far as I'm aware, they are still the recipient of the largest fine of that nature in history.
In the US, at one stage a court even ruled that Microsoft should be broken up because of the nature of their software bundling arrangements, though that was subsequently overturned on appeal.
Numerous sources can be yours for the price of entering "Microsoft antitrust" into the search engine of your choice.
Yes, in some places that is true, but I am talking here about "minor" copyright infringement. If stealing a $1 chocolate bar is criminal theft, I'm suggesting (as a basis for discussion) that perhaps downloading a movie instead of buying a $10 DVD should be criminal copyright infringement, and therefore something that public authorities are responsible for policing in the same way that they would prosecute someone caught stealing a chocolate bar from a store.
You can't force a company to meet your standards unless you can get a court verdict against them, and that's already been tried with Microsoft and it failed.
Erm... Say what? For one thing, Microsoft has lost some of the biggest lawsuits and been subject to some of the most severe penalties in the modern corporate tech sector. For another thing, the issues around their direction with Windows 10 haven't been litigated yet, and the kind of consumer advocacy we're discussing in this very thread is often how that process starts.
OK, I'll take you at your word and ask you this, then: why is insider trading considered a bad thing? It's only acting rationally based on true facts. Regardless of the outcome for the inside trader, no other investor was ever guaranteed any particular value for the shares they hold. The business itself is still there and has still issued the same number of shares. So why has anyone lost out in insider trading, and why does the law prohibit it, in your view?
So if you want to sit around and whine about how bad MS is, go ahead, but it isn't productive and it's annoying.
Strange that you're still posting in this discussion if you find it so annoying. Also strange that you seem to equate everyone's comments here with mere whining, when at least the people I've been reading and debating with seem to be more interested in talking about actions that might usefully be taken in the real world.
The only rational solution, if you don't like the way they're treating you, is to vote with your feet.
Well, no, we could also raise awareness of the issues to put pressure on them to change their behaviour, and if that doesn't work, we could take legal action on various grounds, which is customarily how one enforces one's rights against a business that is misbehaving and refuses to do better.
or 2) you can find a better vendor.
The trouble is, if all anyone ever does it post online about how they'll take their business elsewhere, that doesn't magically create any better vendors to move to. It takes competition in the market place to do that, and part of that competition comes from holding vendors to the standards we require of them in terms of treating their customers fairly and punishing those that do not meet those standards.
The commercial artists who experimented with a low-threshold access to material (by not enforcing copyright) showed us empirical data that this is in fact a more likely explanation of reality.
Really? Most of the experiments I've seen along those lines seem to have found results that were far less positive about people paying for work just out of good nature, and most of the exceptions were situations where the artist was already very well known thanks to earlier work supported by the usual payment model. Did you have any specific examples in mind where that was not the case?
Of course there are always those who will give money to support creative work that they believe in, entirely voluntarily. Charity applies in this sector as in almost any other with worthy goals. But it's a big jump from acknowledging that other forms of funding can be viable and useful in some cases to arguing that the copyright-backed model doesn't generate substantial extra revenues over relying on charity or other alternative models alone.
Where in the anti-trust trial was the part about deceiving users into installing a completely different operating system from the one they thought they were getting, even if they actively didn't want it? Either I missed that minor detail, or you're just making stuff up to support a poor attempt at trolling.
They didn't decline to use Windows in the first place.
What does that have to do with the price of fish? Obviously no-one purchasing Windows 7 back in 2010 knew what the situation would be today, nor did they necessarily give any consent to anything Microsoft today might do unless it was clearly part of their contract of sale. For that matter, someone who purchased a new PC with Windows 7 installed last week presumably wasn't expecting or asking for that PC to be "upgraded" immediately to Windows 10 instead. (You did realise that Windows 7 PCs are just about still available from OEMs today, right?)
Windows Update is an integral part of the OS, and the only way to get security updates, so of course they can also use it to sneak in stuff you don't want.
That may be true technically, but it's far from true legally. That's why they could be in trouble now.
Also, keep in mind that security updates necessarily imply that the original product was defective. The main reason big software companies get away with not being sued all the time for shipping defective products and the damage caused by those defects is that as long as there is a reasonable culture of ongoing support, in particular fixing serious defects such as security vulnerabilities for free and in timely fashion, there is a happy if somewhat informal understanding. Microsoft have long published the lengths of time they commit to giving that support for as part of their lifecycle documentation, and their customers have made purchasing decisions based on that public information. They don't get to go back on that now without taking the consequences, nor does any practical need for them to provide security patches somehow imply that they have permission to do anything else using the same technical mechanisms.
Again, if you don't like the way Microsoft treats you as a customer, stop buying their products.
Perhaps a lot of people already did, but that in no way affects what they are entitled to in connection with any purchases they already made.
Not in much of the world, no. As far as I'm aware, the US is alone in offering such staggering punitive damages in this context. The US also has an everyone-pays legal system, allowing for rather transparent barratry in various copyright-related actions, so it's not as if the legal system there being heavily stacked in favour of wealthy rightsholders is surprising. Fortunately, most of the world is not the litigious absurdity that the US is in these respects.
Apparently your country has very different fraud laws to a lot of places, then, because in many countries serious fraud is a criminal act that often carries heavy penalties.
Also, can you really not see any parallel between insider trading (someone exploits the system for personal gain at the expense of other investors who lose out on money they were expected to have but for that exploitation) and copyright infringement? Seriously?
The unauthorized access was easy to avoid - turn off updates.
If the user didn't intend to authorise it, there's a strong argument that is was unauthorised. If the user actively attempted to avoid it, for example by cancelling out of dialogs in a way that would normally cause no further action to be taken, that's a very strong argument that it was unauthorised.
The burden of proof would fall on Microsoft to show that it was authorised, but a lot of the arguments they might try to make would be easily undermined at this point by direct and obvious comparisons with techniques used by malware that everyone would agree was unauthorised.
They will also argue that the maximum liability is set at $5 for the original OS, and Windows 10 is just an OS update, so the liability terms haven't changed.
Well, we're talking about the UK, so I'm betting that the maximum liability was not set at $5. In any case, consumer protection laws are relatively strong here, so terms like that could well be unenforceable.
Which?, or one of their staff, should take Microsoft to court if they got hit with the update.
They don't have to. This is Which? we're talking about. They'll probably be taking it up directly with Trading Standards and possibly other government representatives, all of whom will no doubt have received complaints already from other sources as well. And those government authorities will then be in a position to take direct action against Microsoft if they find it appropriate.
If they don't like Microsoft's business practices, then they should stop using Microsoft products. Otherwise, they should shut up and stop complaining.
That seems a weak argument when we're talking about people who did try to decline the update to Windows 10 but wound up getting it anyway.
True, but don't underestimate the power of Which?. They have a high profile, and when these guys speak, the media pays attention. This could bring an ugly issue for Microsoft to much wider public and therefore political awareness than any number of geeks calling Microsoft out for it in their geeky online forums.
Also, it's not token compensation Microsoft has to worry about in this situation, even though such compensation might wind up outweighing any near-future benefits from the big GWX campaign financially. The real problem they're going to have is if someone wins a suit against them for consequential losses and whatever weasel words they have in their legalese don't get them out of it, opening the floodgates to thousands or even millions or similar claims. Well, that or actual criminal charges for unauthorised access to computer systems, given that clearly a lot of people believed they had declined the update but then had it installed anyway. Given that we have quite strong consumer protection laws here in the UK, I wouldn't consider either of those possibilities out of the question unless a real lawyer can explain why those rules clearly couldn't apply here.
You're ignoring many kinds of fraud, particularly all the ones that involve deceptive practices such as misleading insurance sales or insider trading. In such cases, frequently no-one has literally lost money that was previously in their bank account, yet the law makes reasonable assumptions about future money that should have been in their bank account if the normal economic and legal rules were followed.
The business model is failing and the damage is hypothetical only if you disregard all those pesky principles of law and economics that the whole system depends on. The trouble is, if everyone discarded those principles the same way, then by your argument there would still be no damage done, yet in practice the whole system would collapse and many of those works would no longer be produced.
What insane compensation demands? Almost no-one, at least in my country, is being sued for large amounts of money for copyright infringement, even if they've ripped thousands of pounds' worth of content. Unless you're actually running a major piracy site or large-scale DVD cloning farm or something like that, your chances of suffering any penalty under the law for copyright infringement are extremely low. That's the point.
Unfortunately, we've wound up with a system where enough people are honest and pay for content that some of it is commercially viable to create, yet those honest people are effectively subsidising the freeloaders who benefit from the same content without contributing anything to support it.
Then to address the freeloaders we've wound up with a kind of pseudo-enforcement system through the likes of takedown notices and DRM. From the point of view of Big Media, these moderate the perceived damage from copyright infringement. But in the process they again hurt honest customers, who have to put with crap like unskippable content on their disks, or seeing perfectly legal parody content removed from sites like YouTube, or having their new game keep crashing because the DRM servers are overloaded on launch day.
Basically, because of the lack of effective enforcement through normal legal means, we now have an alternative system that hits legitimate customers not once but twice. I don't see how that is a good thing.
Of course, that alternative system is probably also less effective from the rightsholder's point of view. While that may not get in the way of Hollywood making next year's summer blockbusters that will bring in a fortune anyway, it can be a very different story for an individual artist or small business when their original content gets ripped and shared, and it really can send those businesses under.
You keep writing "imaginary financial damages", which is begging the question. The economic damage from copyright infringement may be difficult to quantify exactly -- no-one sensible is arguing that everyone who infringes would really have bought everything they copied illegally if the infringement were somehow prevented -- but the idea that copyright infringement causes no significant damage is silly. The damage is no more imaginary than the damage from fraud because the money was just 1s and 0s in a bank's computer.
Also, you keep coming back to this idea of crazily disproportionate financial penalties, but in reality those penalties have hardly ever been awarded. Moreover, the criminal laws so often criticised as excessive by anti-copyright campaigners, while varying by jurisdiction, tend to be aimed squarely at professional infringers who are making a lot of money at the expense of legitimate rightsholders (and, incidentally, clearly demonstrating an actual loss to those rightsholders, since the customers duped into buying the illegal rips demonstrably were willing to pay real money for the works in question). Again, I think large scale fraud is a better analogy than anything to do with theft at that point.
It's a matter of degree.
Obviously legal systems differ from place to place, but in my country civil suits can normally only result in compensation for actual losses. In a defamation suit, if say a celebrity loses a lucrative sponsorship deal after an libelous allegation that they take illegal drugs, the court might take the value of that sponsorship deal into account when determining those losses. That means a big pay-out, usually enough to justify the cost of bringing a civil legal action. However, in the case of say a single individual copying a single DVD that they could otherwise have bought from Amazon for £10, the people who made that DVD have no mechanism for effectively enforcing their legal rights, because the costs are prohibitive relative to recovering probably less than £10 of actual loss.
The difference in practice is that defamation suits tend to be one-offs and if there has been serious damage as a result it's typically all addressed in a single case against a single other party or a small number of related other parties. Copyright infringement, while overall it too could represent a lot of financial damage, is death by a thousand cuts, and it's not practical under our system to exercise your legal rights against each individual infringer. For related reasons, a serial infringer who rips off many rightsholders by a small amount each time may benefit greatly overall, yet may effectively be immune to any sort of penalty from any of them because there's no mechanism to combine any resulting legal actions to make them cost-effective.
Just to be clear, I have absolutely nothing against individuals and private charities doing good work. I donate to some of those charities myself, and long may they continue.
But equally, as a taxpayer, I have nothing against my government using (for example) military personnel and equipment who are trained and able to operate in harsh environments to support rescue and relief operations in areas hit by natural disasters. There is little that I personally can contribute in such an environment other than financial and moral support, because I don't personally own any large transport aircraft or have enough first aid skills to treat seriously injured people with minimal resources for an extended period because the real hospital just got knocked down by a tsunami. If my own friends or family were in such a situation, I would be grateful to anyone else who offered emergency aid, and so I am happy that the resources I contribute to through taxes can sometimes do that for others.
As for taxes, I personally like paying taxes. As a wise man once said, in return I get civilization.
I always feel like that saying misses out the middle step. In reality, in return for taxation you get authorities with more power than you individually have. How much civilization you get depends on the nature of those authorities and how they wield that power, hence another old saying about accepting no taxation without representation.
Getting back to the matter at hand, apparently this is a silly situation that is against the interests of the local residents and yet benefits no-one. On the other hand, the principle of protecting states' rights that seems to have been behind the court decision here is a reasonable one.
If it's also the case that the service here is funded by local government from tax money but is offering its services to those who aren't local voters/taxpayers, then the principle that the locals shouldn't be required to subsidise it through their own taxation isn't entirely unreasonable either. However, this argument seems much more shaky if those local authorities do in fact have the support of their electorate/taxpayers. After all, our national governments typically make international aid payments or use national resources to send assistance to other parts of the world after natural disasters, and a lot of us have no problem with that even though it's (a tiny part of) our tax money that is funding it. We feel like helping others in these situations is simply the right thing to do, and our governments are better able to do it than individual citizens.
That aside, is there a better way to set up this local Internet access, legally speaking, so that a useful practical arrangement can continue without risking a conflict with any fundamental principles of how the government is constituted?
I'm not arguing that the current copyright rules aren't excessive in some (perhaps most or all) jurisdictions today. On the contrary, I would be the first to agree that they are and that copyright should be brought back to a reasonable level that is justified as an incentive but does not go excessively far beyond that.
However, that is a different point to whether infringement of reasonable copyright protection should be treated as a criminal matter to allow effective enforcement, which is my "devil's advocate" proposition here.
(a) Not all countries allow punitive, statutory damages in civil cases.
(b) Whether awards of such damages are possible, how many people ever actually pay them, as a proportion of those committing copyright infringement?