"does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity; and"
Google does not lose the safe harbor by making money off of YouTube; if they did, the DMCA safe harbor would be vitiated. The benefit has to be _directly_ attributable to the infringing activity; an indirect benefit like "more people come to the site, and thus see the ads, thus raising revenue" does not qualify.
If that was the school's argument, it was pretty weak. If the school was in the US, the work could not become the university's property without an explicit written transfer; university policy is not sufficient. Further, even if turning in his own work was technically copyright infringement, it would not be plaigerism. They aren't the same thing. Plaigerism is the use of another's work without giving credit for it. You can plaigerize work in the public domain, and you can infringe copyright while giving full credit.
Of course, university disciplinary boards aren't known for their attention to fairness and justice, so I'm not surprised.
There is no way in copyright law that work performed by a student for the school is property of the school, without an explicit written assignment. It can't be a work for hire, because the student does not work for the school. And 17 USC 204 requires any copyright transfer to be in writing.
It won't work. The case misses one of the most important parts of the legal system: the relative importance of the plaintiff and the defendant to the powers that be.
There's no way a (long-out-of-high-school) judge is going to look at this as anything but a bunch of sniveling high school students whining about a service with the lofty goal of preventing cheating. He'll go out of his way to find a loophole through which Turnitin can slip.
There's two dangers to the "any other version" clause
1) An overly permissive future license allows other people to use and distribute your code in their product without providing source or with restrictions you find repugnant. Not very likely, but consider if the FSF got itself sued for software patent violations or something and Microsoft actually obtained control of it.
2) A more restrictive future license allows other people to use and distribute your code in their product without allowing you to use their code without those new restrictions. This is much more likely.
I don't think it's insane for the FSF to recommend the "and all future versions" clause; they trust themselves, after all. But I don't see why anyone else should.
It's not so unusual for companies to lay off at the top and hire at the bottom. It IS unusual for them to do it all at once and to come right out and say that's what they're doing. I'm not sure if their honesty is a good thing or a bad thing.
It seems that Circuit City has decided that a more experienced and thus higher-paid salesperson doesn't sell much (if anything) more than a high-school dropout hired right off the street. If that's the case, raises and higher pay simply don't make sense and a switch to a model where they hire people who can't get anything better, never give raises, and accept the resulting high turnover makes business sense. Even if it is pretty much evil.
One immediate question I would have is whether he would leave in the "or any later version" clause this time or remove it again. If he does that we might have to go through this whole mess again in another 15 years, but maybe that's the idea.
IMO, it doesn't make sense to leave in the "or any later version" clause unless you either ARE the FSF, or you trust the FSF completely. Linus clearly doesn't fit either of those two criteria.
And that you aren't married (ok, this is/.). That no one is dependent on you. That you don't need to work the next day. That you pay for your own medical care (and no, employer provided insurance does not count--your coworkers end up paying for you) and always will (no Medicare later and no switch to employer provided insurance). So basically if you are independently wealthy to the point of being unemployed and have no dependents, then drinking is only harmful in the actions that you might take when drunk. Otherwise, drinking beyond moderation (one or two drinks a day; averaging towards one) does harm others.
The underlying premise here has nothing to do with drinking. You are asserting a moral imperative to not harm yourself, to keep yourself healthy, and furthermore to take as little risk as possible.
It's the same reasoning which leads to cries to ban fast food and potato chips. It's a suffocating view of morality which leaves nothing in the personal sphere. And the only proper thing to do with it is to reject it utterly.
Martha Stewart was proof that in a technically complex case, a motivated prosecutor can get a jury to convict an innocent but unsympathetic defendant.
Which is similar to the reasons the RIAA dropped this case but will continue to go after college students. This was a loser. College students, even should they be 100% innocent, would have the cards stacked against them. Well, unless they were foolish enough to sue one who was profoundly deaf.
Juvenile vitriolic statements like these aren't death threats. They're just noise. Merely wishing someone dead isn't a death threat, and I seriously doubt Ms. Sierra's claim that the law treats such wishes as such.
And her absolute shock at seeing vitriolic statements on a blog run by someone calling himself "Rageboy", or on one called "meankids.org", comes off as pretty silly. What'd you expect, calm and reasoned adult discussion?
There's no conflict between shopping at Best Buy for products and not wanting to use them for services. With a product, you just do your own research, go in and buy the thing, don't buy the extended warranty, and your contact with them is over. With a service, you have to deal with them continuously.
If you believe all that, I've got a bridge to sell you. As soon as the deal is closed, BestBuy will be imposing their corporate policies on Speakeasy. First thing will be HR policies -- those will cause many of the best people at Speakeasy to jump ship. Then they'll start cutting services that aren't part of their "core" -- since it's part of "Best Buy for Business", that probably means residential services will be going, piece by piece. Customer service? Best Buy insist on cost cutting there too. Somewhere along the line Mr. Chatterly will take his money and run. Things will get worse, until Best Buy sells the what's left of the company to AT&T or Verizon.
In the section on antitrust, the Wikipedia article is somewhat confusingly contrasting "illegal per se" with "presumed but rebuttable". At the very top, though, it pretty clearly states that "The term illegal per se means that the act is inherently illegal. Thus, an act is illegal without extrinsic proof of any surrounding circumstances such as scienter or other defenses."
If you want "presumed but rebuttable", it's "prima facie". Were the courts to decide that minimum prices were "prima facie" illegal, then companies could set a minimum price but if they were sued and the plaintiff showed they were setting a minimum price, they would have the burden of proving that the minimum price was not anticompetitive. With the current "per se" situation, once the plaintiff has demonstrated the defendant is setting the minimum price, he prevails.
Nope, read the article (yeah, Slashdot, I know). Currently minimum sales prices are _per se_ illegal. What you've described would be _prima facie_ illegal.
And Corbis, despite court decisions saying otherwise (including, I believe, one in which they were the _defendant_) will claim a copyright on their digital reproductions of those historically significant, instantly recognizable images.
1. Liberty does come at a very high price: the blood of partriots.
The blood of patriots AND tyrants. If it's just the patriots doing the bleeding, there's no payoff. Not that I'm suggesting shooting music company execs or RIAA lawyers while screaming "sic semper tyrannis", mind you...
RIAA only has to show that it is more probable than not that you were an infringer. Despite all the contrived defenses proposed on Slashdot, that is not a particularly difficult burden to bear.
And that's the case whether you are an infringer or not. So all the RIAA has to do is threaten to sue and collect $3000. You don't see anything wrong with that?
Nonsense. The best 30 seconds of the show (or movie, or whatever) is the LEAST valuable part. It's the part they give away, constantly showing over and over again in clips and trailers, trying to sucker you into watching the rest.
And while posting the last 30 seconds of Citizen Kane might be obnoxious, it certainly wouldn't necessarily be a copyright violation. Besides, by now doesn't everyone know that "Rosebud" was Kane's;lAS ){A*R7}}}}}}}}}d}}d}}d
Remember, for the purpose of demonstrating prior art, the prior art has to be pretty much exactly the patented invention. However, for the purpose of demonstrating infringement, the alleged infringer's product just has to be close. This is a ridiculous state of affairs.
If the order isn't stayed pending appeal, Vonage is dead; revenue drops to zero nearly overnight. So are all other independent VoIP providers, when Verizon gets around to crushing them.
A concrete manifestation of a patent system out of control.
It's a bad move to make threats. Either they can stop you from carrying them out, in which case you're totally fucked anyway, or they can convince you (through threats of prison rape, arresting your family on bogus charges, seizing all your bank accounts and leaving you homeless, and the like) to not carry them out. If you're going to be defiant, you've got to do it immediately and irrevocably. If you get such a letter, your window for defiance is very short.
Exactly zero of those 140,000 have violated one of those administrative gag orders, here in the land of the free and the home of brave. Either the government has already gotten so terrible that to defy it is mere foolishness, or the people have gotten the government we deserve.
You can be found liable if a minor gets injured or killed in your non-secured car; that's attractive nuisance law. You can't be found liable if a thief steals your car and uses it in a bank robbery.
Slashdot Mirror
The DMCA FAQ is not quite precise enough here.
The actual words used in DMCA 512(c)(1)(B) are
"does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity; and"
Google does not lose the safe harbor by making money off of YouTube; if they did, the DMCA safe harbor would be vitiated. The benefit has to be _directly_ attributable to the infringing activity; an indirect benefit like "more people come to the site, and thus see the ads, thus raising revenue" does not qualify.
If that was the school's argument, it was pretty weak. If the school was in the US, the work could not become the university's property without an explicit written transfer; university policy is not sufficient. Further, even if turning in his own work was technically copyright infringement, it would not be plaigerism. They aren't the same thing. Plaigerism is the use of another's work without giving credit for it. You can plaigerize work in the public domain, and you can infringe copyright while giving full credit.
Of course, university disciplinary boards aren't known for their attention to fairness and justice, so I'm not surprised.
There is no way in copyright law that work performed by a student for the school is property of the school, without an explicit written assignment. It can't be a work for hire, because the student does not work for the school. And 17 USC 204 requires any copyright transfer to be in writing.
It won't work. The case misses one of the most important parts of the legal system: the relative importance of the plaintiff and the defendant to the powers that be.
There's no way a (long-out-of-high-school) judge is going to look at this as anything but a bunch of sniveling high school students whining about a service with the lofty goal of preventing cheating. He'll go out of his way to find a loophole through which Turnitin can slip.
There's two dangers to the "any other version" clause
1) An overly permissive future license allows other people to use and distribute your code in their product without providing source or with restrictions you find repugnant. Not very likely, but consider if the FSF got itself sued for software patent violations or something and Microsoft actually obtained control of it.
2) A more restrictive future license allows other people to use and distribute your code in their product without allowing you to use their code without those new restrictions. This is much more likely.
I don't think it's insane for the FSF to recommend the "and all future versions" clause; they trust themselves, after all. But I don't see why anyone else should.
It's not so unusual for companies to lay off at the top and hire at the bottom. It IS unusual for them to do it all at once and to come right out and say that's what they're doing. I'm not sure if their honesty is a good thing or a bad thing.
It seems that Circuit City has decided that a more experienced and thus higher-paid salesperson doesn't sell much (if anything) more than a high-school dropout hired right off the street. If that's the case, raises and higher pay simply don't make sense and a switch to a model where they hire people who can't get anything better, never give raises, and accept the resulting high turnover makes business sense. Even if it is pretty much evil.
The underlying premise here has nothing to do with drinking. You are asserting a moral imperative to not harm yourself, to keep yourself healthy, and furthermore to take as little risk as possible.
It's the same reasoning which leads to cries to ban fast food and potato chips. It's a suffocating view of morality which leaves nothing in the personal sphere. And the only proper thing to do with it is to reject it utterly.
Martha Stewart was proof that in a technically complex case, a motivated prosecutor can get a jury to convict an innocent but unsympathetic defendant.
Which is similar to the reasons the RIAA dropped this case but will continue to go after college students. This was a loser. College students, even should they be 100% innocent, would have the cards stacked against them. Well, unless they were foolish enough to sue one who was profoundly deaf.
Statutory damages of $750 to $100,000 per infringement, that's how.
Juvenile vitriolic statements like these aren't death threats. They're just noise. Merely wishing someone dead isn't a death threat, and I seriously doubt Ms. Sierra's claim that the law treats such wishes as such.
And her absolute shock at seeing vitriolic statements on a blog run by someone calling himself "Rageboy", or on one called "meankids.org", comes off as pretty silly. What'd you expect, calm and reasoned adult discussion?
There's no conflict between shopping at Best Buy for products and not wanting to use them for services. With a product, you just do your own research, go in and buy the thing, don't buy the extended warranty, and your contact with them is over. With a service, you have to deal with them continuously.
If you believe all that, I've got a bridge to sell you. As soon as the deal is closed, BestBuy will be imposing their corporate policies on Speakeasy. First thing will be HR policies -- those will cause many of the best people at Speakeasy to jump ship. Then they'll start cutting services that aren't part of their "core" -- since it's part of "Best Buy for Business", that probably means residential services will be going, piece by piece. Customer service? Best Buy insist on cost cutting there too. Somewhere along the line Mr. Chatterly will take his money and run. Things will get worse, until Best Buy sells the what's left of the company to AT&T or Verizon.
In the section on antitrust, the Wikipedia article is somewhat confusingly contrasting "illegal per se" with "presumed but rebuttable". At the very top, though, it pretty clearly states that "The term illegal per se means that the act is inherently illegal. Thus, an act is illegal without extrinsic proof of any surrounding circumstances such as scienter or other defenses."
If you want "presumed but rebuttable", it's "prima facie". Were the courts to decide that minimum prices were "prima facie" illegal, then companies could set a minimum price but if they were sued and the plaintiff showed they were setting a minimum price, they would have the burden of proving that the minimum price was not anticompetitive. With the current "per se" situation, once the plaintiff has demonstrated the defendant is setting the minimum price, he prevails.
Nope, read the article (yeah, Slashdot, I know). Currently minimum sales prices are _per se_ illegal. What you've described would be _prima facie_ illegal.
And Corbis, despite court decisions saying otherwise (including, I believe, one in which they were the _defendant_) will claim a copyright on their digital reproductions of those historically significant, instantly recognizable images.
Screw them.
And that's the case whether you are an infringer or not. So all the RIAA has to do is threaten to sue and collect $3000. You don't see anything wrong with that?
Nonsense. The best 30 seconds of the show (or movie, or whatever) is the LEAST valuable part. It's the part they give away, constantly showing over and over again in clips and trailers, trying to sucker you into watching the rest.
And while posting the last 30 seconds of Citizen Kane might be obnoxious, it certainly wouldn't necessarily be a copyright violation. Besides, by now doesn't everyone know that "Rosebud" was Kane's;lAS ){A*R7}}}}}}}}}d}}d}}d
NO CARRIER
Remember, for the purpose of demonstrating prior art, the prior art has to be pretty much exactly the patented invention. However, for the purpose of demonstrating infringement, the alleged infringer's product just has to be close. This is a ridiculous state of affairs.
If the order isn't stayed pending appeal, Vonage is dead; revenue drops to zero nearly overnight. So are all other independent VoIP providers, when Verizon gets around to crushing them.
A concrete manifestation of a patent system out of control.
It's a bad move to make threats. Either they can stop you from carrying them out, in which case you're totally fucked anyway, or they can convince you (through threats of prison rape, arresting your family on bogus charges, seizing all your bank accounts and leaving you homeless, and the like) to not carry them out. If you're going to be defiant, you've got to do it immediately and irrevocably. If you get such a letter, your window for defiance is very short.
Exactly zero of those 140,000 have violated one of those administrative gag orders, here in the land of the free and the home of brave. Either the government has already gotten so terrible that to defy it is mere foolishness, or the people have gotten the government we deserve.
You can be found liable if a minor gets injured or killed in your non-secured car; that's attractive nuisance law. You can't be found liable if a thief steals your car and uses it in a bank robbery.