For example, I read that the lawyers involved in the tobacco settlement ended up with about $60000 USD per hour of work. Something tells me they were overpaid, even if I fully supported suing big tobacco. Nobody works hard enough to deserve $60000 per hour.
What you read is nonsense. The settlement "requires the tobacco companies to [reimburse] state and local governments for all reasonable costs (costs and expenses for which the industry would reimburse their own counsel and agents) and expenses and in-house attorney fees associated with the tobacco industry litigation. Reimbursement will be at the market rate for hourly fees in each state." Moreover, most of the lawyers worked for the states as AAG's. Regardless of what the state took in, they took home their salaries. The remainder of the settlement -- the lion's share -- went to the states themselves, not as windfall but reimbursement. It did not go to the lawyers, though certainly it was thanks to them.
The lawyers did pause to wonder whether the lawsuit would alter the defendants' behavior. The Notice of Proposed Settlement provides:
Injunctive Relief
The Settlement Agreements with the Distributor Defendants and the Retailer Defendants each provide for injunctive relief. The Plaintiffs and Distributor Defendants have agreed to the entry of a permanent injunction, which would prohibit the Distributor Defendants for a period ending August 30, 2007 from adopting, maintaining, enforcing or threatening to enforce any policy, practice or plan which makes receipt of any cooperative advertising or other promotional funds contingent on the price or price level at which any product is advertised or promoted. Distributor Defendants would also be prohibited from agreeing with any dealers to control or maintain the resale price at which the Dealer may offer for sale or sell such Distributor Defendant's Product. Additionally, Distributor Defendants could not for a period ending August 30, 2005, announce resale or minimum advertised prices of product and unilaterally terminate those who fail to comply because of such failure. Distributor Defendants may however, announce suggested retail prices for their Product.
The Settlement Agreements entered into by Plaintiffs and each of the Retailer Defendants, also contain injunctive provisions. These injunctions would prohibit the Retailer Defendants for a period of five years from soliciting, demanding, requesting, advocating or encouraging any distributor or wholesaler of music product to adopt or implement any policy, practice or plan which makes receipt of any cooperative advertising or other promotional funds contingent upon the price or price level at which any music product is advertised, promoted, offered or sold.
No, I don't know where they got these magic termination dates....
The OED -- do you subscribe? I've only been able to get it to give me the "word of the day." I have an OED Shorter, but I was too lazy to open it for this silliness.
Apparently there IS a Latin plural word "viri" but it wasn't popular even with the people who spoke Latin. A good argument I read somewhere is that because virus is now an English word, make the plural in the English way -- add "es".
Really, do what works. I have to remind myself to drop octopi. It's fun to out-snob a snob, though.:)
As for the facts: The Notice of Proposed Settlement specifies, "The attorneys' fees and expenses sought by Plaintiff States and Counsel for the Plaintiff Settlement Class will not exceed 21.5% of the Settlement Fund and 10.1% of the total Settlement." Either way, that's a lot less than "win a lot more of the settlement than you will"; and it's reimbursement, not windfall.
If you live in New York or Florida, note that your State Attorney General was a principal co-counsel, meaning if they did not recover fees, the cost would come out of your pocket as a taxpayer. Perhaps there were side agreements with other states to share the expenses, given that the settlement affects all states.
Remember also that the counsel took the case with fees contingent on winning. The wins have to pay for the losses, and inadequate awards only make it harder for attorneys -- including AG's -- to take on meritorious but difficult cases.
I will make a comment about politicians -- Eliot Spitzer is quite the crusader, isn't he?
What's wrong with Conan the Barbarian? It's even alliterative, and alludes to survivorship. But you knew this
I like that the name "radiodurans" encapsulates literally the bacteria's claim to fame. How about "Radioduran the Radical"?
"The red bacterium can withstand 1.5 million rads-a thousand times more than any other life form on Earth and three thousand that of humans" -- do they mean all life forms complex and bacteria plus other single-celled organisms? If so, I would indeed wonder whether this bacteria came from somewhere else... but if it has ancient origins, isn't it odd it didn't evolve away from mechianisms designed for an absent danger, which I assume entail some cost to the organism? The writer does mention the resistance might be good for drought also. Fascinating.
If I were a metasnob, I'd say I'm pretty sure the fancy plural for virus (lit. "poison") would be viri. No cause for "ii".
But viri is probably wrong. The "i" for plural thing turns out to be a product of some grammarian's fundamental misunderstanding of word derivations. Read this re the most famous example, octopus/octopi/octopoda/octopuses. In brief, "pus" means foot and it makes no sense to hack it up to make a plural.
Ever wonder why flammable and inflammable are synonymous? Same thing -- a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
As for bacteria -- that's already plural. Bacterium is singular. (I think.:)
That Falwell case was very interesting. It concerned a "fake ad" parody:
"Jerry Falwell talks about his first time." The cartoon was intended to resemble a Campari alcohol ad. Hustler's ad suggested that Falwell's first sexual experience was a drunken, incestuous rendezvous with his mother in an outhouse. It also suggested that he is a hypocrite who preaches exclusively while drunk. A small print disclaimer at the bottom of the page said, "Ad parody, not to be taken seriously."
Falwell sued and won a $200,000 judgment for emotional distress. However, the Supreme Court sent him home with nothing. A key factor was that Falwell is a "public figure," and so is more limited in damages he can recover. A rare 8-0 slam dunk on a controversial topic, this odd little case was considered a major victory for free speech and satire.
Anyway, a far cry from anything here. I can't see how this case would survive the motion to dismiss.
For Mac faithful, try Chimera Navigator which is astonsihly based on Gecko yet worlds apart from Netscape. It's a nice example of a rapid development project benefitting from the OS X environment. 0.6 is a major advance.
I use Opera and like it, but you do have to pay $40 for it, and we have three machines. I'm a little worrid about Opera's apparent feature creep.
I don't know what Chimera's future is, but it's free and GPL. I wish Safari all the best but will wait a little. And WHY with Aqua have they still not dropped that awful brushed metal look??? Chimera does a better job of Aqua than Apple's own product.
All went well until WOPR was fed some bad data. Of course the programmers had overlooked that error condition and before anyone knew what was happening... global thermonuclear war!
Well, I liked that movie. Which I hope you remember.
I haven't seen the Clancy DVD but I'll take a wild guess that he places complete faith in the competence and integrity of gov't officials? That seems to be a theme of his.:)
I *think* they're talking about monitoring the Internet to defend (somehow) against a concerted effort to disrupt communication -- not the TIA collection of data on people.
Though I suppose anything can be abused.
I think if the terrorists want to hurt us, they won't bother with the Internet in the way currently employed by 14 y.o. kids. They'd blow up/. certainly, but not the whole thing...
Yeah, it's the self-replicating feature of the GPL -- the way it automatically follows derivative works -- that is pretty clever.
I have no idea of the feasibility, nor of foreign law.
I would guess, however, that the technology may be ephemeral enough that the patent is not worthwhile. Also, unlike Amazon, the poster is not in a fiercely competitive for-profit situation, and can probably outcompete on price alone over also-rans. Thus you avoid the cost and aggravation of patents and stay out of the software patenting game altogether.
I'm HOPING that anti-spam techniques in general will be rendered obsolete in the next few years by effective legislation. A dream, I know. Right now I'm getting about 70% spam, which the Apple spam filter pretty efficiently kills off. As the spam grows, so does the wait for measly few messages I care about. Sigh. (Yes, I could sign up for a filtering service, but the idea of spending money to rid myself of junk I shouldn't have to deal with at all is irritating.)
Yes, that's why I said if the Sun were to explode.:)
The model I remember is that the sun will turn into a red giant in a mere several billion years, enveloping the Earth, then contract again. It may never explode because it is too small.
I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the Sun exploding. Having a big meteor hit us is a lot more probable. Well, anything is more probable than an event that is probably impossible.... Far more probable that the errant asteroid is that will all get caught up in a nuclear war, our own little bitty version of a supernova. What are the chances of humans lasting another billion years? Hmm. Probably depends on us.
To my ear, it sounded like the writer is not afraid of other people patenting his ides -- which as I understand it prior art can torpedo -- but of other hijacking his open source ideas to build their products.
Is there a fairly straightforward way to monitor patent applications so that the writer could bring prior art or the patent to the examiner's attention? I know many of the records are now online, and have flipped through them myself out of curiosity.
I'm new to this stuff and would welcome clarification.
oriiginal story: it may be exploding in the near future
Hmm, interesting phrasing considering the star exploded (if it did explode) a long, long, long time ago. (10,000+ years). Even if the Sun were to explode we wouldn't know for several minutes, strange to think.
Get a patent, and the worst you could just give anyone who wanted to use it a free license. Use the same theory as the GPL people do -- use a restrictive intellectual property rights power, in their case copyright, to prevent others from commercializing your work product. Their "copyleft" is merely copyright with unusual provisions, and if you look at their license you'll see the word copyright a dozen times. Perhaps a self-contained license for your patent could also be written and enforced -- ask for advice from the GPL project.
I am not an IP lawyer, nor practicing law here, so absolutely do consult with a specialist. In the state, many lawyers participate in free or nominal fee 30-minute consultations. One hitch it that to actually obtain a patent may cost several hundred dollars (quid) for which you might solicit user donations. Set aside a little for enforcement; the GPL people have lawyers, too.
And, no, getting a patent is not crossing over to the dark side.:)
The credit-rating agencies jointly offer a service designed to prevent pre-approved credit card offers from being sent. As you probably have heard, these offers can be a security risk if someone pilfers one and fills it out with their address (why the credit card companies don't use better security is beyond me).
Note this is a junk mail problem, lasts just 2 years, and won't suppress offers from companies that do not use the credit-rating agencies -- but the call is automated and really fast. The FTC also lists the addresses for DMA junk mail and telemarketing opt-outs.
My friend will be pleased to hear that you're satisfied -- he designed some of the antenna-pointing algorithms for the Sirius satellites, and was tired of hearing how well XM was doing. He, of course, is on the fence about subscribing.:)
I don't think it's just about wanting to force people through all of your ads.
I can understand objecting to another site repeatedly linking to yours to the point of imitating your content without attribution, getting a free ride on both your content and server load. Heck, you could mimic the entire site. There must be copyright issues if you misrepresent ownership of the creative material, or use them beyond fair use. The Tickets.com case didn't resolve everything.
As for directing someone to a page, that seems very reasonable, especially because it's pretty hard to track down a page after the home page changes.
Also, just as a matter of politeness, I would want to respect the wishes of the site owner. But they should make their wishes clear, say in the HTML of the page. Doesn't the referrer tag make it pretty easy to police your oen pages against casual intrusion? Anyway, a liberal linking policy in more in the spirit of the internet; I hope site owners think twice before clamping down.
I forgot that Central Hudson may not even be relevant to a political speech case, as it concern "mere" commercial speech which had no protection whatsoever until relatively recently. One would probably go directly to "strict scrutiny," which few laws survive.
A reference (see n.99) with a funny anecdote, making the same point. The article looks interesting, and discusses the next frontier, spam. Note this passage, which appears to confirm my gut instinct (rare but nice):
However, when the government attempts to protect individual privacy by preventing an entire category of unsolicited commercial solicitations from being sent through the mail on the ground that the solicitation is offensive, the government violates the First Amendment.[49] The First Amendment does not permit the government to prohibit speech as intrusive unless the "captive" audience cannot avoid objectionable speech.[50] Recipients of junk mail can avoid offensive speech because the "`short, though regular, journey from mail box to trash can . . . is an acceptable burden . . . so far as the Constitution is concerned.'"[51] Moreover, there may be some willing junk mail recipients whose interests in communication also would be frustrated by a government ban on certain classes of junk mail.
The opt-in DNC is different, but is it enough of a distinction? I don't think so, I believe the citizens must say "no" themselves; but we'll see eventually -- possibly first with political spam.
I think -- and I'm replying to be thorough, not annoying -- that the "property rights" idea doesn't enter into the equation here. Privacy rights do, the "right to be let alone" esp. at home.
Here (section 1B) is a fuller treatment of the First Amendment question with respect to the currently proposed regulations; said discussion is limited to commercial speech. As you can see from the Central Hudson analysis, the courts will look very carefully at a prior restraint like this. If political speech were at issue, or all speech, then I think the DNC regulation would fail at least the "narrowly tailored" prong, and probably the "compelling interest." In the past the courts have been very very antagonistic to prior restraints and content-based regulation.
Anyway, it will be a minor miracle if effective DNC regs for commercial calls goes through. Restriction of political calls is speculative at this point. Part of my point was that there are reasons not to do it besides the self-interest of politicians -- which I'm sure plays a part as well; although I would think a DNC list would tend to favor incumbents and big-party candidates.
Hmm. DNC = Democratic National Committee. Subliminal advertising?:)
I do wonder what difference it would make it people were charged for incoming calls as they are on cellphones after the first minute (is that one-minute deal universal?). I'm sure the telephone company could contrive some way of having the caller pick up the tab.
The analogy cuts both ways, and I believe favors free speech. The primary problem is the DNC is the *gov't* enforcing that right. One of the main purposes of the solicitation ordinance was to protect elderly residents from being "bothered" by sales pitches. (I don't know exactly how it achieved this.) With the DNC list you essentially have to go to the gov't first. Or face their penalties. Really fatal is that you have to buy the list from them; I'm sure they'd have to waive that. Also, political speech is considerably better protected than commercial. Many, many cases have shown this. If you look at the solicitation case, the Court was intensely critical of the encumbrance on speech. An 8-1 vote means even the most conservative members crossed the line to join the more liberal.
These are potential problems. There is no problem with people expressing their preferences in advance, but have the gov't do it for them? Prior restraints -- forbidding someone from speaking in advance -- are particularly suspect. Perhaps citizens have to do so for them selves -- "No Soliciting" -- and their are gadgets to let you do so with the telephone (caller id, the famed hang-up).
It's ironic, really, you'd think the solicitors would be delighted to have a list of people who don't want to talk to them, but they must realized many of those who sign up can still be swayed.
Another weakness I hadn't reflected on much is that it is somewhat unclear what statutory authorization the FCC and FTC, both of which have proposed lists, have to spend money on and enforce DNC lists. It may lie outside their mandate and require explicit authorization and appropriations from Congress.
I'm not working up arguments for the plaintiffs, just trying to predict from experience, so don't bother trying to argue with me. There is probably more online already concerning this. At a minimum with regard to political speech, I foresee problems, and it is likely that it will be a while before anyone even attempts to limit such speech and invites the fight. Personally I can deal with saying "no" and although the idea of a DNC list sounds delightful, I like the First Amendment, too. Believe it or not, there really is a right to pester people, at least briefly.
Slashdot Mirror
True the RIAA is just a proxy.
Yet most of your rant is misdirected. The attorney reimbursement is 20% or less and the settlement does address future prices.
For example, I read that the lawyers involved in the tobacco settlement ended up with about $60000 USD per hour of work. Something tells me they were overpaid, even if I fully supported suing big tobacco. Nobody works hard enough to deserve $60000 per hour.
What you read is nonsense. The settlement "requires the tobacco companies to [reimburse] state and local governments for all reasonable costs (costs and expenses for which the industry would reimburse their own counsel and agents) and expenses and in-house attorney fees associated with the tobacco industry litigation. Reimbursement will be at the market rate for hourly fees in each state." Moreover, most of the lawyers worked for the states as AAG's. Regardless of what the state took in, they took home their salaries. The remainder of the settlement -- the lion's share -- went to the states themselves, not as windfall but reimbursement. It did not go to the lawyers, though certainly it was thanks to them.
No, I don't know where they got these magic termination dates....
The OED -- do you subscribe? I've only been able to get it to give me the "word of the day." I have an OED Shorter, but I was too lazy to open it for this silliness.
:)
Apparently there IS a Latin plural word "viri" but it wasn't popular even with the people who spoke Latin. A good argument I read somewhere is that because virus is now an English word, make the plural in the English way -- add "es".
Really, do what works. I have to remind myself to drop octopi. It's fun to out-snob a snob, though.
Thanks for the support. :)
As for the facts: The Notice of Proposed Settlement specifies, "The attorneys' fees and expenses sought by Plaintiff States and Counsel for the Plaintiff Settlement Class will not exceed 21.5% of the Settlement Fund and 10.1% of the total Settlement." Either way, that's a lot less than "win a lot more of the settlement than you will"; and it's reimbursement, not windfall.
If you live in New York or Florida, note that your State Attorney General was a principal co-counsel, meaning if they did not recover fees, the cost would come out of your pocket as a taxpayer. Perhaps there were side agreements with other states to share the expenses, given that the settlement affects all states.
Remember also that the counsel took the case with fees contingent on winning. The wins have to pay for the losses, and inadequate awards only make it harder for attorneys -- including AG's -- to take on meritorious but difficult cases.
I will make a comment about politicians -- Eliot Spitzer is quite the crusader, isn't he?
What's wrong with Conan the Barbarian? It's even alliterative, and alludes to survivorship. But you knew this
... but if it has ancient origins, isn't it odd it didn't evolve away from mechianisms designed for an absent danger, which I assume entail some cost to the organism? The writer does mention the resistance might be good for drought also. Fascinating.
I like that the name "radiodurans" encapsulates literally the bacteria's claim to fame. How about "Radioduran the Radical"?
"The red bacterium can withstand 1.5 million rads-a thousand times more than any other life form on Earth and three thousand that of humans" -- do they mean all life forms complex and bacteria plus other single-celled organisms? If so, I would indeed wonder whether this bacteria came from somewhere else
If I were a metasnob, I'd say I'm pretty sure the fancy plural for virus (lit. "poison") would be viri. No cause for "ii".
:)
But viri is probably wrong. The "i" for plural thing turns out to be a product of some grammarian's fundamental misunderstanding of word derivations. Read this re the most famous example, octopus/octopi/octopoda/octopuses. In brief, "pus" means foot and it makes no sense to hack it up to make a plural.
Ever wonder why flammable and inflammable are synonymous? Same thing -- a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
As for bacteria -- that's already plural. Bacterium is singular. (I think.
Already! Impressive. Do try Chimera, though. :)
... sometimes.
And yes, I'm very faithful to Apple, even using sluggish Apple Mail
Falwell sued and won a $200,000 judgment for emotional distress. However, the Supreme Court sent him home with nothing. A key factor was that Falwell is a "public figure," and so is more limited in damages he can recover. A rare 8-0 slam dunk on a controversial topic, this odd little case was considered a major victory for free speech and satire.
Anyway, a far cry from anything here. I can't see how this case would survive the motion to dismiss.
Do you look like Ellen Feiss?
:)
If yes, this may not be a safe place for you....
For Mac faithful, try Chimera Navigator which is astonsihly based on Gecko yet worlds apart from Netscape. It's a nice example of a rapid development project benefitting from the OS X environment. 0.6 is a major advance.
I use Opera and like it, but you do have to pay $40 for it, and we have three machines. I'm a little worrid about Opera's apparent feature creep.
I don't know what Chimera's future is, but it's free and GPL. I wish Safari all the best but will wait a little. And WHY with Aqua have they still not dropped that awful brushed metal look??? Chimera does a better job of Aqua than Apple's own product.
All went well until WOPR was fed some bad data. Of course the programmers had overlooked that error condition and before anyone knew what was happening ... global thermonuclear war!
:)
Well, I liked that movie. Which I hope you remember.
I haven't seen the Clancy DVD but I'll take a wild guess that he places complete faith in the competence and integrity of gov't officials? That seems to be a theme of his.
I *think* they're talking about monitoring the Internet to defend (somehow) against a concerted effort to disrupt communication -- not the TIA collection of data on people.
/. certainly, but not the whole thing...
Though I suppose anything can be abused.
I think if the terrorists want to hurt us, they won't bother with the Internet in the way currently employed by 14 y.o. kids. They'd blow up
Yeah, it's the self-replicating feature of the GPL -- the way it automatically follows derivative works -- that is pretty clever.
I have no idea of the feasibility, nor of foreign law.
I would guess, however, that the technology may be ephemeral enough that the patent is not worthwhile. Also, unlike Amazon, the poster is not in a fiercely competitive for-profit situation, and can probably outcompete on price alone over also-rans. Thus you avoid the cost and aggravation of patents and stay out of the software patenting game altogether.
I'm HOPING that anti-spam techniques in general will be rendered obsolete in the next few years by effective legislation. A dream, I know. Right now I'm getting about 70% spam, which the Apple spam filter pretty efficiently kills off. As the spam grows, so does the wait for measly few messages I care about. Sigh. (Yes, I could sign up for a filtering service, but the idea of spending money to rid myself of junk I shouldn't have to deal with at all is irritating.)
Yes, that's why I said if the Sun were to explode. :)
The model I remember is that the sun will turn into a red giant in a mere several billion years, enveloping the Earth, then contract again. It may never explode because it is too small.
I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the Sun exploding. Having a big meteor hit us is a lot more probable. Well, anything is more probable than an event that is probably impossible.... Far more probable that the errant asteroid is that will all get caught up in a nuclear war, our own little bitty version of a supernova. What are the chances of humans lasting another billion years? Hmm. Probably depends on us.
To my ear, it sounded like the writer is not afraid of other people patenting his ides -- which as I understand it prior art can torpedo -- but of other hijacking his open source ideas to build their products.
Is there a fairly straightforward way to monitor patent applications so that the writer could bring prior art or the patent to the examiner's attention? I know many of the records are now online, and have flipped through them myself out of curiosity.
I'm new to this stuff and would welcome clarification.
oriiginal story: it may be exploding in the near future
Hmm, interesting phrasing considering the star exploded (if it did explode) a long, long, long time ago. (10,000+ years). Even if the Sun were to explode we wouldn't know for several minutes, strange to think.
Get a patent, and the worst you could just give anyone who wanted to use it a free license. Use the same theory as the GPL people do -- use a restrictive intellectual property rights power, in their case copyright, to prevent others from commercializing your work product. Their "copyleft" is merely copyright with unusual provisions, and if you look at their license you'll see the word copyright a dozen times. Perhaps a self-contained license for your patent could also be written and enforced -- ask for advice from the GPL project.
:)
I am not an IP lawyer, nor practicing law here, so absolutely do consult with a specialist. In the state, many lawyers participate in free or nominal fee 30-minute consultations. One hitch it that to actually obtain a patent may cost several hundred dollars (quid) for which you might solicit user donations. Set aside a little for enforcement; the GPL people have lawyers, too.
And, no, getting a patent is not crossing over to the dark side.
The credit-rating agencies jointly offer a service designed to prevent pre-approved credit card offers from being sent. As you probably have heard, these offers can be a security risk if someone pilfers one and fills it out with their address (why the credit card companies don't use better security is beyond me).
More information from FTC.
Note this is a junk mail problem, lasts just 2 years, and won't suppress offers from companies that do not use the credit-rating agencies -- but the call is automated and really fast. The FTC also lists the addresses for DMA junk mail and telemarketing opt-outs.
My friend will be pleased to hear that you're satisfied -- he designed some of the antenna-pointing algorithms for the Sirius satellites, and was tired of hearing how well XM was doing. He, of course, is on the fence about subscribing. :)
I don't think it's just about wanting to force people through all of your ads.
I can understand objecting to another site repeatedly linking to yours to the point of imitating your content without attribution, getting a free ride on both your content and server load. Heck, you could mimic the entire site. There must be copyright issues if you misrepresent ownership of the creative material, or use them beyond fair use. The Tickets.com case didn't resolve everything.
As for directing someone to a page, that seems very reasonable, especially because it's pretty hard to track down a page after the home page changes.
Also, just as a matter of politeness, I would want to respect the wishes of the site owner. But they should make their wishes clear, say in the HTML of the page. Doesn't the referrer tag make it pretty easy to police your oen pages against casual intrusion? Anyway, a liberal linking policy in more in the spirit of the internet; I hope site owners think twice before clamping down.
A reference (see n.99) with a funny anecdote, making the same point. The article looks interesting, and discusses the next frontier, spam. Note this passage, which appears to confirm my gut instinct (rare but nice):
The opt-in DNC is different, but is it enough of a distinction? I don't think so, I believe the citizens must say "no" themselves; but we'll see eventually -- possibly first with political spam.
I think -- and I'm replying to be thorough, not annoying -- that the "property rights" idea doesn't enter into the equation here. Privacy rights do, the "right to be let alone" esp. at home.
:)
Here (section 1B) is a fuller treatment of the First Amendment question with respect to the currently proposed regulations; said discussion is limited to commercial speech. As you can see from the Central Hudson analysis, the courts will look very carefully at a prior restraint like this. If political speech were at issue, or all speech, then I think the DNC regulation would fail at least the "narrowly tailored" prong, and probably the "compelling interest." In the past the courts have been very very antagonistic to prior restraints and content-based regulation.
Anyway, it will be a minor miracle if effective DNC regs for commercial calls goes through. Restriction of political calls is speculative at this point. Part of my point was that there are reasons not to do it besides the self-interest of politicians -- which I'm sure plays a part as well; although I would think a DNC list would tend to favor incumbents and big-party candidates.
Hmm. DNC = Democratic National Committee. Subliminal advertising?
I do wonder what difference it would make it people were charged for incoming calls as they are on cellphones after the first minute (is that one-minute deal universal?). I'm sure the telephone company could contrive some way of having the caller pick up the tab.
Yes and no.
The analogy cuts both ways, and I believe favors free speech. The primary problem is the DNC is the *gov't* enforcing that right. One of the main purposes of the solicitation ordinance was to protect elderly residents from being "bothered" by sales pitches. (I don't know exactly how it achieved this.) With the DNC list you essentially have to go to the gov't first. Or face their penalties. Really fatal is that you have to buy the list from them; I'm sure they'd have to waive that. Also, political speech is considerably better protected than commercial. Many, many cases have shown this. If you look at the solicitation case, the Court was intensely critical of the encumbrance on speech. An 8-1 vote means even the most conservative members crossed the line to join the more liberal.
These are potential problems. There is no problem with people expressing their preferences in advance, but have the gov't do it for them? Prior restraints -- forbidding someone from speaking in advance -- are particularly suspect. Perhaps citizens have to do so for them selves -- "No Soliciting" -- and their are gadgets to let you do so with the telephone (caller id, the famed hang-up).
It's ironic, really, you'd think the solicitors would be delighted to have a list of people who don't want to talk to them, but they must realized many of those who sign up can still be swayed.
Another weakness I hadn't reflected on much is that it is somewhat unclear what statutory authorization the FCC and FTC, both of which have proposed lists, have to spend money on and enforce DNC lists. It may lie outside their mandate and require explicit authorization and appropriations from Congress.
I'm not working up arguments for the plaintiffs, just trying to predict from experience, so don't bother trying to argue with me. There is probably more online already concerning this. At a minimum with regard to political speech, I foresee problems, and it is likely that it will be a while before anyone even attempts to limit such speech and invites the fight. Personally I can deal with saying "no" and although the idea of a DNC list sounds delightful, I like the First Amendment, too. Believe it or not, there really is a right to pester people, at least briefly.