Unfortunately, "contributory" and "vicarious" infringement cases looked to be open and shut also. There was no law on the books making those actions unlawful. But judges extended copyright infringement law to cover those cases. A friendly judge (which the RIAA has no shortage of) would certainly be willing to add "making available for infringement" to that list.
Naa, just wait until the cloud is in the right part of the orbit and detonate a big nuke in the upper atmosphere. This temporarily expands a portion of the upper atmosphere, causing the orbits of the junk to degrade faster. Pick the place such that the fallout falls on the vacation homes for the top Chinese officials. Nuclear weapons... is there anything they can't do?
A bit more complicated -- music is purchased in the US. Buyer travels to Canada. A Canadian copies the music (legally). Now, there are two (legal) copies; one in the US and one in Canada. The Canadian now travels to the US, and has her laptop (with the copy on it) checked. She is detained. What law was broken?
All it will take is for the Judge to order the jury to consider the watermark to be positive identification of the file owner. Since the file owner is responsible for the distribution of said file, case closed...you lose!
Actually that's two unreasonable jury instructions, not one. The file owner is not responsible for the distribution of said file; there's certainly no statute which says so. What matters is who is distributing the file, not who bought it in the first place.
The idea that a property owner is responsible for what other people do with his property is popular with the public. It's also popular with politicians, which means it will probably get entered more and more into law. But it isn't in copyright law yet. If I loan a friend a DVD (legal), and without my knowledge or consent he rips it, makes a torrent, and puts it up on Pirate Bay (decidedly illegal), I have not committed copyright infringement.
Besides, isn't the RIAA and MPAA's line that we don't actually own these files, but merely license them? If the file owner is responsible, I guess that lets the purchaser off the hook!
Last time I was there, I was able to board a domestic flight (Queensland to Christchurch) not only without showing ID, but without even going through a metal detector).
This wasn't a stray signal. Even TV remotes are engineered to prevent stray signals from working. The system wasn't engineered to prevent generation of malicious signals, probably because that wasn't in the spec.
Not the privacy issue; it's bad for bars to be surreptitiously recording their patrons identity, whether they do it with a scanner or if they just write down names when they check IDs -- forget the technology, it's creepy regardless. But the underaged drinking issue is win-win. The bars win because if they scan the IDs and they come up good, they've checked the ID and are protected from punishment for serving minors. The underaged drinkers win because they get served. And the geeks making the fake IDs win, because it's easier to make working fakes if they're just going to be run through a scanner and not closely examined.
If I need a large vehicle 10% of the time, it probably does not make economic sense to purchase both that large vehicle and a smaller vehicle for the other 90% of the time. The larger vehicle will substitute adequately (if inefficiently) for the smaller, but the smaller will not substitute for the larger, so the larger is the one which is purchased. This has nothing to do with safety or cock size or anything like that.
In the former case, why would a gardening tool on your property be considered your responsibility in the event that someone injures their self? I'm speaking specifically regarding an instance in which you did not permit this person on your property in the first place which, when considered logically, should be considered trespassing.
Whether or not they were trespassing doesn't matter in some states. This is stupid but true.
If this were not the case, theoretically landscaping improvements such as trees, boulders, bricks, etc. would cause personal liability as well in the event that an incident occurred involving one of those items.
They could, but it's less likely. A gardening tool lying around that someone trips over can be easily construed as negligence on the part of the property owner. If someone walks into a tree it's a lot harder to argue (though no doubt someone has tried to make the case somewhere).
Also, in the case of an attractive nuisance, I believe it would be necessary to establish that it was left in place despite a warning by the county or whoever manages the properties in the area for the homeowner's collective or whatever the hell they are called.
What is and is not an "attractive nuisance" can be established both by statute and case law. There is no need for any warning for liability to exist. Like I said, I personally (and again IANAL) find it unlikely that a bench would be considered an attractive nuisance, but I'm sure someone would make the argument in the case you brought up.
You let the feds in even though their warrant specified an e-mail server which was at your hosting ISP? That was foolish.
Sure, they want you to believe that you shouldn't tell them "no". And they will retaliate if you tell them "no" and they get a warrant later. But it's the only way you can assert your rights, and if you're not willing to assert them, you might as well not have them. And perhaps, if their investigation was legitimate, they would have found what they wanted on that e-mail server at your hosting ISP, and not bothered to raid your house.
I _would_ tell them to go away if they didn't have a warrant for my place. Yes, I know it's somewhat quixotic. But obviously, given your story, cooperating has negative consequences also.
If you leave a gardening tool in your lawn, and a person trips on it and hurts themselves, who is at fault? If you put a bench in your yard where people can sit and rest and some kid pushes another who then falls and cuts his head on the bench, who is at fault?
The answers to these two are probably different. In the former case, you are probably responsible; you have a duty to keep your property in a condition that visitors not be injured. In the latter case, you are not responsible, unless the kid's lawyer can make a case for the bench for being an attractive nuisance.
IANAL.
Honestly, I think its disgusting that people drive around using SUVs, Minivans, and four by fours as their normal commuting vehicle when 90% of the time its just them.
So you expect them to buy one car for commuting and one car for everything else they do? That gets expensive pretty quickly, in initial cost, insurance, and to some degree maintenance.
If you had to sign something saying that you wouldn't watch TV, play video games, or read slashdot in order to get a drivers license. Wouldn't you sign their stupid document and then do what you want anyway?
"Duty of care" is a more general term than "in loco parentis", but I have been unable to find any information suggesting that a teacher's duty of care to his/her students extends to non-school-sponsored activities outside school hours.
How far through did you think that? The fact is, if you remove the legal barrier between booze and eighteen year olds, your going to have a whole lot of bodies to clean up.
Right. Because those legal barriers are SO effective now.
Maybe in a different time or place you'd be right, but consider the mentality toward alcohol here in the States. In Europe, for example, alcohol isn't that big of a deal because they don't have our laws,
Bingo. You want to get rid of the current US mentality towards alcohol, get rid of the drinking age and other neoprohbitionist laws. Then alcohol won't be a big deal.
Yes, the legal drinking age is 21 in the USA, thanks to a law passed in 1984. But don't worry about kids not getting experience; the law is more honoured in the breach than the observance. Rich kids, if nothing else, go to Mexico during spring break of their senior year of high school to get all sorts of experience drinking irresponsibly. Less rich kids just get other people to buy beer for them.
You don't think that with just those pictures you could get at least one of the kids to admit what was going on there?
A fast-thinking kid might say something like "Yeah, I was there and I didn't want to drink, but I didn't want to look uncool so I just carried around an empty all night". Even someone who was there probably couldn't contradict this, unless the kid was seen actually opening a can and immediately drinking from it.
But even if no one admits it, that may be against the policy (the one for my high school said I couldn't even be at parties with alcohol, as I remember), and then you could just show it to the parents and let them take care of it however they want to.
I remember pledges like that in high school. Some of them they tried to convince you that you were required to sign, and I would just neglect to (usually they'd just pass around a sign up sheet). Others they really did make you sign to participate in some activity X, but I wasn't much for extracurricular activities. Draconian crap like that gets pretty problematic pretty quickly -- after all, children and teens go to parties involving alcohol perfectly legitimately on many occasions. Sometimes they're even held at the teens' house... by the parents (horrors, my father's 40th birthday party involved much alcohol, almost all of it consumed by those well over 30. Yeah, I had some too, but even if I hadn't, it would have been against that sort of nonsense policy).
I remember a guy in middle school who used to drink soda out of a bottle in a paper bag at lunch
I used to drink beer out of a Mountain Dew bottle in a paper bag at lunch. Then they banned soda, so it was Black Russians or Kaluha and Creme in a chocolate milk bottle. Until senior year, when I switched to vodka in a water bottle.
OK, not really. The smartest person in this sordid story is the senior who refused to admit to anything and noted that they couldn't prove there was alcohol in the drinks. Sure, she's not telling the whole truth, but even if she outright lied it wouldn't be ethically wrong under the circumstances, IMO -- the administration can be considered to be the enemy.
The important point was this: teachers act "in loco parentis" to their under-age students. We are their legal guardians when they are at school, and that responsibility does not evaporate off school grounds.
Unless your school is a boarding school, how can you claim to act "in loco parentis" to students who are not at school or involved in a school sponsored activity? Isn't that in conflict with the responsibilities and rights of the students' _real_ parents or legal guardians?
They're not in your favor if the guy ahead of you has sunblock. You'd both be better off without the rules in place.
You don't _need_ to bring anything but ID with you on the plane, but having had an airline employee try to prevent me from retrieving my luggage, to the point where I had to tell him that if he wanted to stop me he could call the cops (he didn't, which is why I'm not in prison for disrespecting an airline employee or some such thing), I'd rather keep some essentials where the airlines can't easily lose or misplace them. Not to mention that I'd like to have some water to drink on the plane, beverage service in a full coach compartment can be pretty miserly.
Judging by the overflowing trash cans at the entrance to every security entry, it doesn't seem that the stupid passenger realizes they should wait until AFTER they clear security before they buy another Coke.
Sometimes they run you back through security just to increase Coke sales on the secure side of the airport (where they cost $5/can)
If passengers would bring only the bare essentials, we'd have shorter waits (and easier access to our overhead storage bins).
We tried that. They thought the lines were going a little too quickly and people weren't getting pissed off enough, so they started requiring everyone remove their shoes again (for a while, athletic shoes were not required to be removed), then they came up with the stupid liquid/gel rule to really screw things up. Once people get used enough to that one, they'll just tighten the screws even further to keep things screwed up.
Better yet, why don't you leave your freakin' sunblock in your suitcase. You'd save us all a bunch of time. If you don't like the rules, then get them changed.
Him and what army? If you don't like the TSA's discussion of his sunblock wasting your time, YOU get the rules changed if it's so possible.
If throttling encrypted traffic becomes popular enough, people will come up with encrypted protocols which are too computationally expensive to distinguish from non-encrypted protocols in real time.
But price aside, I'm curious what the Slashdot crowd thinks of the choice between ATT and Comcast simply from a moral ground. Which company, in your view, is "better"? And I don't mean which company makes it easier to pirate materials, but which company behaves more ethically?
You're kidding, right? That's like deciding between Stalin and [censored by Godwin], between Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti, between Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, etc....
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, "contributory" and "vicarious" infringement cases looked to be open and shut also. There was no law on the books making those actions unlawful. But judges extended copyright infringement law to cover those cases. A friendly judge (which the RIAA has no shortage of) would certainly be willing to add "making available for infringement" to that list.
Naa, just wait until the cloud is in the right part of the orbit and detonate a big nuke in the upper atmosphere. This temporarily expands a portion of the upper atmosphere, causing the orbits of the junk to degrade faster. Pick the place such that the fallout falls on the vacation homes for the top Chinese officials. Nuclear weapons... is there anything they can't do?
Attempted import of an unauthorized copy.
Actually that's two unreasonable jury instructions, not one. The file owner is not responsible for the distribution of said file; there's certainly no statute which says so. What matters is who is distributing the file, not who bought it in the first place.
The idea that a property owner is responsible for what other people do with his property is popular with the public. It's also popular with politicians, which means it will probably get entered more and more into law. But it isn't in copyright law yet. If I loan a friend a DVD (legal), and without my knowledge or consent he rips it, makes a torrent, and puts it up on Pirate Bay (decidedly illegal), I have not committed copyright infringement.
Besides, isn't the RIAA and MPAA's line that we don't actually own these files, but merely license them? If the file owner is responsible, I guess that lets the purchaser off the hook!
This wasn't a stray signal. Even TV remotes are engineered to prevent stray signals from working. The system wasn't engineered to prevent generation of malicious signals, probably because that wasn't in the spec.
Not the privacy issue; it's bad for bars to be surreptitiously recording their patrons identity, whether they do it with a scanner or if they just write down names when they check IDs -- forget the technology, it's creepy regardless. But the underaged drinking issue is win-win. The bars win because if they scan the IDs and they come up good, they've checked the ID and are protected from punishment for serving minors. The underaged drinkers win because they get served. And the geeks making the fake IDs win, because it's easier to make working fakes if they're just going to be run through a scanner and not closely examined.
If I need a large vehicle 10% of the time, it probably does not make economic sense to purchase both that large vehicle and a smaller vehicle for the other 90% of the time. The larger vehicle will substitute adequately (if inefficiently) for the smaller, but the smaller will not substitute for the larger, so the larger is the one which is purchased. This has nothing to do with safety or cock size or anything like that.
Whether or not they were trespassing doesn't matter in some states. This is stupid but true.
They could, but it's less likely. A gardening tool lying around that someone trips over can be easily construed as negligence on the part of the property owner. If someone walks into a tree it's a lot harder to argue (though no doubt someone has tried to make the case somewhere).
What is and is not an "attractive nuisance" can be established both by statute and case law. There is no need for any warning for liability to exist. Like I said, I personally (and again IANAL) find it unlikely that a bench would be considered an attractive nuisance, but I'm sure someone would make the argument in the case you brought up.
You let the feds in even though their warrant specified an e-mail server which was at your hosting ISP? That was foolish.
Sure, they want you to believe that you shouldn't tell them "no". And they will retaliate if you tell them "no" and they get a warrant later. But it's the only way you can assert your rights, and if you're not willing to assert them, you might as well not have them. And perhaps, if their investigation was legitimate, they would have found what they wanted on that e-mail server at your hosting ISP, and not bothered to raid your house.
I _would_ tell them to go away if they didn't have a warrant for my place. Yes, I know it's somewhat quixotic. But obviously, given your story, cooperating has negative consequences also.
So you expect them to buy one car for commuting and one car for everything else they do? That gets expensive pretty quickly, in initial cost, insurance, and to some degree maintenance.
No. I'd drive without a license.
But I see your point, and I agree with it.
"Duty of care" is a more general term than "in loco parentis", but I have been unable to find any information suggesting that a teacher's duty of care to his/her students extends to non-school-sponsored activities outside school hours.
Right. Because those legal barriers are SO effective now.
Bingo. You want to get rid of the current US mentality towards alcohol, get rid of the drinking age and other neoprohbitionist laws. Then alcohol won't be a big deal.
Yes, the legal drinking age is 21 in the USA, thanks to a law passed in 1984. But don't worry about kids not getting experience; the law is more honoured in the breach than the observance. Rich kids, if nothing else, go to Mexico during spring break of their senior year of high school to get all sorts of experience drinking irresponsibly. Less rich kids just get other people to buy beer for them.
I used to drink beer out of a Mountain Dew bottle in a paper bag at lunch. Then they banned soda, so it was Black Russians or Kaluha and Creme in a chocolate milk bottle. Until senior year, when I switched to vodka in a water bottle.
OK, not really. The smartest person in this sordid story is the senior who refused to admit to anything and noted that they couldn't prove there was alcohol in the drinks. Sure, she's not telling the whole truth, but even if she outright lied it wouldn't be ethically wrong under the circumstances, IMO -- the administration can be considered to be the enemy.
They're not in your favor if the guy ahead of you has sunblock. You'd both be better off without the rules in place.
You don't _need_ to bring anything but ID with you on the plane, but having had an airline employee try to prevent me from retrieving my luggage, to the point where I had to tell him that if he wanted to stop me he could call the cops (he didn't, which is why I'm not in prison for disrespecting an airline employee or some such thing), I'd rather keep some essentials where the airlines can't easily lose or misplace them. Not to mention that I'd like to have some water to drink on the plane, beverage service in a full coach compartment can be pretty miserly.
If throttling encrypted traffic becomes popular enough, people will come up with encrypted protocols which are too computationally expensive to distinguish from non-encrypted protocols in real time.
You're kidding, right? That's like deciding between Stalin and [censored by Godwin], between Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti, between Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, etc....
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a server farm under tow!
(latency's a bitch, though)