So, I think it is unlikely that Qualcomm would sue many of these people.
However, I don't have that in writing, and neither do any of those impacted by these takedowns. If they file a counter-claim, they're open to a lawsuit.
Certainly they won't incur any risk if they just ask nicely for Qualcomm to take back their requests, or give them assurance that they aren't in violation. However, it seems unlikely to me that they would get a response. If nothing else corporate bureaucracy makes it hard for employees of companies to give official statements to people who send them letters.
My point wasn't that it was likely that anybody filing a counter-claim would be sued. I merely am saying that it is possible, which means they're taking a risk, and they probably stand to gain nothing personally by taking it. That is likely to have a chilling effect.
What rules? I see nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters. A Federal Court has already ruled that all these FAA press releases have no binding power over anybody, dismissing the only case the FAA has brought which has gone to judgement so far.
Apples and oranges.
That court ruling is in regard to the process of issuing fines for the use of a UAV for commercial purposes. Most articles I've read about this ruling have take an academic legal argument being made to avoid paying a fine, and have extrapolated it into some huge governmental over reach. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Congress has given the FAA this power to regulate (set rules, levy fine) anything that flies for commercial purpose. This power seems rather clear cut and the court agrees. The court's only issue is that the FAA was ambiguous in defining a UAV for the purpose of issuing fines - that the FAA rules could essentially fine a commercial operator for a paper airplane, which even the FAA agrees would be ridiculous.
The court's issue was that the FAA had not "issued an enforceable FAR regulatory rule governing model aircraft" and that subsequent attempts to create policy were "not issued as a notice of proposed rulemaking" and "did not satisfy the requirements of 5 USC 533(d)."
As I stated above, "I don't deny that the FAA has the legal authority to create regulations governing UAVs. They just haven't done it yet."
When I was a kid there wasn't some little box that both let me play games and run up a $1000 credit card bill.
Yes there was. It was called a telephone.
Sure, and people could restrict the ability to make calls to pay numbers, which is what this whole issue is about.
I'll agree that you could call a long-distance phone number, but kids weren't too likely to do that for fun. I'd have been all for giving parents the ability to restrict access to making toll calls, though.
If that was clearly explained functionality then I expect you'd find very quick;y that no one would use that company.
I guess that they would just use the other local cable company. Oh wait, back in the 80s there wasn't ANY competition for the local cable company. Today there is hardly any competition, which isn't much better.
Actually, they have. It falls under other rules for model aircraft.
As others have pointed out, the FAA has not issued any rules for model aircraft, either. They've only issued advisory circulars.
Hence my point about "nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters." If you feel differently, cite the appropriate regulation. For example, 14 CFR 121.317(h) says that you're not allowed to smoke in a commercial airliner bathroom. That is a federal regulation and enforceable in court.
What lost time is there for a volunteer on an FOSS project? The courts do NOT award lost time for responding to the lawsuit, but they might award it for the actual takedown notice, assuming you can show damages
You are assuming a "volunteer" is not paid. In many cases, it is a false assumption.
I was speaking only of unpaid volunteers. So:
What lost time is there for an unpaid volunteer on an FOSS project? The courts do NOT award lost time for responding to the lawsuit, but they might award it for the actual takedown notice, assuming you can show damages.
What are the SI units for that?
Americans (mostly) don't use SI units. But what is the SI unit to bone damage in a broken leg? What is the SI unit for autism? What is the SI unit that measures impact of an infection on the organism? All these cases are quite easy to quantify.
The term quantify means to assign a number to something. How many autisms does Michelle Dawson have, just to pick a random example?
I wasn't suggesting that courts don't award money for stress. I just found it amusing that you stated that stress is "easy to quantify." Awards for pain and suffering tend to be the subject of controversy precisely because they aren't easy to quantify.
Maybe. That might depend on how it is advertised. In any case, Qualcomm isn't the one advertising this case, so there is no claim for libel.
So I hire an assassin. The assassin commits a crime, and I'm not responsible for inciting and paying for the execution of the crime? Wow.
If Qualcomm pays somebody to advertise a falsehood then they're certainly liable for libel. They aren't doing that in this case.
How are they depriving you of your IP? They're only preventing you from distributing it, unless github was your only copy of it.
Many many tools rely on automated checkout of libraries and components (under FLOSS licensing) from repositories. Having a base library or something like that unaccessible based on false pretext breaks those tools. This may translate on commercial releases that can't be done because further manual integration needs to be done. If I maintain or contribute to one of those tools, and my employer cannot deploy the latest bugfix or our platform because some monkey decided to file a DMCA, I'd bet they'll be having a bad time. And yes, again - this is quite common; OSS maintainers that are paid for what they do and integrate that work into the employer's product line. The notion that a project volunteer is a poor nerd in a basement, while romantic - is generically wrong. They exist, but they are not the majority.
Sure, if a corporation suffers harm they can use, but only for the harm suffered during a few days time.
I doubt that a few github takedowns are really going to impact a professional operation, however. They tend not to use sites like github as part of their core workflow. It mainly gets used by those poor nerds in basements.
As far as criminal charges go - only a prosecutor can seek those, and to date none has done so over a DMCA claim.
A prosecuter is necessary for a public crime. And some crimes are semi-public (they require a lawyer to file the complaint).
There is no criminal remedy to a false DMCA complaint that doesn't require a prosecutor to file. If you have one in mind that I'm not thinking of, let me know. The crime is perjury, and you can't sue somebody for perjury.
If you file a DMCA counter-notice you are potentially inviting a lawsuit.
Crossing the road is also dangerous.
Sure. So is jumping off of a cliff. Therefore, since I cross the road routinely I shoul
I'd say there is a far greater risk of the firework itself having a failure that sends it somewhere unintended, though even that wasn't much of a risk here.
This is a fireworks display over water. The firework round has a certain total amount of energy available to it determined by the amount of propellant inside. The launchers were probably located far enough from crowds that even under the most unfavorable conditions a round could not have hit anybody - that is if the firework were directly aimed at the crowd. A shot deflecting off a UAV will not travel farther than that - just physics.
Maybe if they're launching shells right over a crowd a deflection would cause a problem, but so would a short round.
Read about the new ridiculous rules the FAA imposed about drones.. Then you will understand. Don't you know we are living in a time when someone does something cool, it is automatically illegal?
What rules? I see nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters. A Federal Court has already ruled that all these FAA press releases have no binding power over anybody, dismissing the only case the FAA has brought which has gone to judgement so far.
Federal agencies can't just issue press releases and demand that people follow them. The US is a nation governed by laws, which means the government needs a law or regulation to cite when taking action against somebody.
I don't deny that the FAA has the legal authority to create regulations governing UAVs. They just haven't done it yet.
Besides lost time, the fact that code was unavailable for possible futural employers to look at, the fact that the volunteer was publicly pointed out as a copyright infringer and may not feel comfortable continuing his pet project? Heck, just the stress of it all is quite easy to prove and quantify.
What lost time is there for a volunteer on an FOSS project? The courts do NOT award lost time for responding to the lawsuit, but they might award it for the actual takedown notice, assuming you can show damages.
And I find your claim that it is "easy to prove and quantify" stress amusing. What are the SI units for that?
While the claim itself is perfectly legal, advertising it may constitute libel if the claim is bogus.
Maybe. That might depend on how it is advertised. In any case, Qualcomm isn't the one advertising this case, so there is no claim for libel.
Also, if the files aren't accessible, they are depriving you of your intellectual property, by claiming its theirs. You already have a ton of posts on this thread explaining in detail why when someone states they're the legitimate copyright owner in a DMCA claim when that is false is - by itself - a crime.
How are they depriving you of your IP? They're only preventing you from distributing it, unless github was your only copy of it. Again, it was only down for a few days, so you're going to have to show damage from that short period of unavailability.
As far as criminal charges go - only a prosecutor can seek those, and to date none has done so over a DMCA claim.
The US court system doesn't recognize the burden of having to defend a lawsuit as damages.
There is no lawsuit. There is a DMCA complaint. If it is publicly displayed and its proved wrong, its libel, and grounds for suing. If the DMCA complaint itself violates the law, its grounds for suing. But I'd be very surprised to see Qualcomm taking anyone to court - you see, that kind of move scares away their customers that use Qualcomm code and semiconductors. This is usually settled fast (outside the court system) and silently.
My entire post concerns a lawsuit following a counter-notice. About 8 posts up I said, "As an individual, once you're in court, you lose. A DMCA counternotice is an invitation to sue -- literally, you tell them where you can be sued. Inviting companies with lawyers on staff to sue you is a great way to lose all your money. Regardless of merit." The reply was, "No, it is not. It sounds like a great way to earn a whole bunch of money from somebody who is having repeated brain farts about what the law actually says."
If you file a DMCA counter-notice you are potentially inviting a lawsuit. You stand nothing to gain other than the right to continue distributing the work in question, and a LOT to lose. For somebody not making money off of the distribution, it is a big risk to take.
If Qualcomm's DMCA complaint indicates they believe they actually a specific part of the kernel that's not a BS complaint anymore. That's a legitimate copyright dispute.
Every compliant DMCA complaint includes a statement that the company believes they own the work being distributed. This one certainly does.
People aren't willing to accept responsibility for themselves and their kids. We shouldn't be forcing the companies to accept the responsibility instead. If you don't agree with how Amazon does it, don't buy their devices or use their appstore. If they feel they're losing too many customers based on their business practices.. they'll change them. Either way, they shouldn't be targeted by the FTC.
When I was a kid there wasn't some little box that both let me play games and run up a $1000 credit card bill. In order to spend my parent's money I'd need to get their wallet and drive to a store, or try to order something over the phone (and NOBODY would accept a phone order from some 6 year old). I doubt I'd have any idea what to do with a checkbook at that age.
Sure, I'm all for teaching responsibility, but giving device owners reasonable options for preventing unauthorized access to spending money is just basic sense. The same is true of things like pay-per-view - if some cable company had a big BUY button on the remote control that if you pushed it twice automatically tuned to a PPV station and bought the first thing on the list without an option for a PIN, then you'd see outrage over that as well.
I've always wondered if Galaxies and SMB are both effects from a common cause. We don't understand dark matter, and that is a HUGE gap when it comes to galaxy formation. If there is some kind of primordial force at work that created the large-scale structure of the universe then perhaps SMB are just an extreme manifestation of it. They didn't necessarily form from steller evolution. Maybe at some period in the past if not today there were huge gravitational gradients that just sucked gobs of matter into SMBs and arranged the larger area around it into galaxies. Those forces may no longer be active today, and they may very well have only been active for a short time to have a big impact on large-scale structures.
However, what I don't know is how something like this would affect the CMB/etc, and this sort of thing may have been completely disproven.
I'm using Feedly, but the one thing I really miss from Google Reader is a mark-read-up-to-here feature. If you're using the mobile app it works well enough to have it mark read each page of articles as you swipe by them. However, the web-based reader only lets you mark an entire feed read at a time, which makes it hard to catch up on large feeds.
If Qualcomm files in court (the next step after a DMCA) that it owns copyright on parts of the Linux Kernel (for example) it would need to assert why it believes it is their code.
Sure. If you file a counter-claim one of their lawyers would review the case. If it is airtight for the defense they would most likely not file a lawsuit. However, the defendant still takes on the risk that Qualcomm feels that they have something worth going after.
Maybe Qualcomm feels that whoever submitted the code to the kernel and signed the DCO wasn't authorized to do so. In that case, they may legally retain the copyright. Maybe they do, maybe they don't - only a court can decide that and no court is going to consider filing a suit a nuisance over something like this.
What you want is [not] a replacement for DMCA but a replacement for the entire US civil law system.
They are still liable for the damages caused by their good faith claim. As anyone that is wrongfully accused of a crime.
And what damages exactly does somebody doing volunteer FOSS work have to show?
The site was only down for a few days, and then per the DMCA it goes back up when you file the counter-claim. What damages were caused during that outage?
The US court system doesn't recognize the burden of having to defend a lawsuit as damages.
You could represent yourself in a clear-cut case like this, where the files are obviously properly licensed. If you give them notice of the licensing in your counter-notice, and they still sue, they could get in trouble for filing a frivolous lawsuit, and you could recover damages.
If you don't actually give them evidence of licensing (and not just notice), then they can argue that they never granted you a license and thus they sued. If you pull out a license they can argue that some rogue employee must not have followed procedure. An argument like that might still lose them the case, but probably would get them out of damages.
And representing yourself still means taking off of work, without compensation, and lots of hassle. One does not enter into a lawsuit lightly, especially when there is no financial gain.
You really have a warped sense of the law here. Note, you aren't filing a countersuit here, you are filing a counter-notice and expecting them to file a formal lawsuit against you if they want to continue. They, the guys who filed the original DMCA notice, need to spend their money filing the lawsuit and going before a federal judge to explain why they want to see you in court.
Their goal is to get people to stop posting stuff on websites. They win as soon as their lawsuit makes headlines. Whether they win the court case doesn't matter to them.
Their risk is basically limited to the cost of litigation - something fairly predictable. The defendant's risk is that predictable cost of litigation plus statutory damages (up to $150k per work, though usually much less).
So, Qualcomm gets to decide if spending $50k on a trial is worth the resulting chilling effects on everybody else. They probably gave thought to this before even filing the takedown notice. They could have decided in advance to not file any actual lawsuits, or they could have decided to budget for one or more of them. So, there is a huge company with an army of lawyers that potentially has money budgeted to go after the most promising person who files a counter-notice.
So, when you file that counter-notice you really are risking your home. The best you're going to do is win your case, which gets you absolutely nothing but the ability to keep your files up on Github. If you're really fortunate you get some or all of your legal costs paid, but this is pretty rare in the US (and you still lose years of your life, and probably your job). The only way you come out ahead is by proving malicious intent, which is hard for even prosecutors with huge budgets to pull off.
We can hope that eventually a judge is going to be annoyed and start treating the conscious action that businesses take when issuing a DMCA takedown notice as sufficient for being "knowingly false".
Judges have been getting annoyed at the RIAA for years. The only result has been that the RIAA has been finding it harder to get victories in court. It isn't like judges are locking up their executives for contempt or even awarding attorney costs to the people they sue.
The US doesn't have a loser-pays system. It is pretty rare to have courts award costs, and even if they do award costs the only people who get paid are the lawyers. If you represent yourself you get nothing even if you could have gotten legal costs, and if you have a lawyer you're taking the risk of not getting paid costs and you're out your own time no matter what.
Hold on. Once it goes to court Qualcomm is falsely asserting copyright. That's fraud. There are most certainly damages people have collected against fraudulent claims of wrongdoing. Ask the RIAA or the big banks paying fines for negligent foreclosure filings.
Fraud requires intent, and proving intent is hard. All Qualcomm has to say is that they thought in good faith that they had a valid claim. You have to prove that they knew all along that they had no valid claim. Courts generally tend to take the middle road, which would be denying the claim but not considering it malicious.
The result of this is what Enigma2175 said. You can fight a big expensive battle and prevail, but your only victory is to be able to put your repository back up on Github. Both sides are likely out a lot of money, which was Qualcomm's goal in the first place - everybody else will just fall into line.
If his NDA is written with the standard terminology used in states that allow them, the wording is probably something along the line of "You agree not to take a position for a competitor in a field that specifically compete with what you were doing here". Even if its not worded that way, its historically how they're enforced in the few tech hubs situated in states that have enforced them.
I've never seen that kind of wording in an NDA. Typically they only prevent the disclosure of actual proprietary info. In my industry people move between companies doing very similar jobs all the time. Granted, it might be from being a direct contributor in one company to a manager of the exact same task in another.
Yup - I'm always amused by construction project management. They closed a road for a year for a bridge expansion, and I think I saw somebody working there maybe one day a week on average.
Non-competes are BS. But requiring employees to not reveal confidential information, poach clients, etc. for their new competing bosses seems like a reasonable and ethical thing to ask. It sounds like Amazon believes he may have crossed this line, beyond simply working for a competitor.
The problem is that you need specific evidence to sue for this. They're suing for a non-compete agreement, which in theory bars working for Google at all and thus has a much lower burden of proof.
NDAs have been around for decades and I don't think anybody has a problem with them. If you write software for company A, you can't give the source code to company B. What is controversial is saying that you can't do anything for company B.
In my industry non-compete agreements are not common, despite there being lots of proprietary information. When you switch employers you can use your skills, but nobody asks anybody what company foo is using in their secret formula, and there is no conflict of interest.
It's marked as a construction zone with increased fines because if someone has an accident in there, it stops up traffic far more than on an open road.
Considering that the area of the road I'm referring to is just as wide as the areas outside the construction zone, I find that unlikely. There is no place to pull off onto the center margin, but there wasn't such a place before they started widening the median either, and it was 65mph at that time.
If drivers such as yourself realised you don't know everything about the road condition, and realised that the way to defeat unfair or improper speed restrictions is in court and not on the road, roads would be safer.
I don't believe I said at any point that I drive over the speed limit.
And nobody is going to start a million dollar lawsuit against the state to change the speed limit in a work zone that will probably be finished up 5 years before litigation is done.
Just because you think the speed limit is incorrect doesn't make it so, and doesn't make it OK to speed.
No, the fact that there are no safety issues in the work zone makes the speed limit incorrect. I never claimed that my personal proclamation should be used as the basis for setting speed limits.
If people drive through a work zone following the limit and find no safety issues, they're likely to ignore the speed limit the next time around. The best way to prevent that is to only display signs when there is actually a safety issue.
Obviously the software is downloading far more than necessary. You can stream 1080p in fairly nice quality with that kind of bandwidth. Unless his screen saver runs at a few frames per second it seems like overkill.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I think it is unlikely that Qualcomm would sue many of these people.
However, I don't have that in writing, and neither do any of those impacted by these takedowns. If they file a counter-claim, they're open to a lawsuit.
Certainly they won't incur any risk if they just ask nicely for Qualcomm to take back their requests, or give them assurance that they aren't in violation. However, it seems unlikely to me that they would get a response. If nothing else corporate bureaucracy makes it hard for employees of companies to give official statements to people who send them letters.
My point wasn't that it was likely that anybody filing a counter-claim would be sued. I merely am saying that it is possible, which means they're taking a risk, and they probably stand to gain nothing personally by taking it. That is likely to have a chilling effect.
What rules? I see nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters. A Federal Court has already ruled that all these FAA press releases have no binding power over anybody, dismissing the only case the FAA has brought which has gone to judgement so far.
Apples and oranges.
That court ruling is in regard to the process of issuing fines for the use of a UAV for commercial purposes. Most articles I've read about this ruling have take an academic legal argument being made to avoid paying a fine, and have extrapolated it into some huge governmental over reach. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Congress has given the FAA this power to regulate (set rules, levy fine) anything that flies for commercial purpose. This power seems rather clear cut and the court agrees. The court's only issue is that the FAA was ambiguous in defining a UAV for the purpose of issuing fines - that the FAA rules could essentially fine a commercial operator for a paper airplane, which even the FAA agrees would be ridiculous.
The court's issue was that the FAA had not "issued an enforceable FAR regulatory rule governing model aircraft" and that subsequent attempts to create policy were "not issued as a notice of proposed rulemaking" and "did not satisfy the requirements of 5 USC 533(d)."
As I stated above, "I don't deny that the FAA has the legal authority to create regulations governing UAVs. They just haven't done it yet."
When I was a kid there wasn't some little box that both let me play games and run up a $1000 credit card bill.
Yes there was. It was called a telephone.
Sure, and people could restrict the ability to make calls to pay numbers, which is what this whole issue is about.
I'll agree that you could call a long-distance phone number, but kids weren't too likely to do that for fun. I'd have been all for giving parents the ability to restrict access to making toll calls, though.
If that was clearly explained functionality then I expect you'd find very quick;y that no one would use that company.
I guess that they would just use the other local cable company. Oh wait, back in the 80s there wasn't ANY competition for the local cable company. Today there is hardly any competition, which isn't much better.
Actually, they have. It falls under other rules for model aircraft.
As others have pointed out, the FAA has not issued any rules for model aircraft, either. They've only issued advisory circulars.
Hence my point about "nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters." If you feel differently, cite the appropriate regulation. For example, 14 CFR 121.317(h) says that you're not allowed to smoke in a commercial airliner bathroom. That is a federal regulation and enforceable in court.
What lost time is there for a volunteer on an FOSS project? The courts do NOT award lost time for responding to the lawsuit, but they might award it for the actual takedown notice, assuming you can show damages
You are assuming a "volunteer" is not paid. In many cases, it is a false assumption.
I was speaking only of unpaid volunteers. So:
What lost time is there for an unpaid volunteer on an FOSS project? The courts do NOT award lost time for responding to the lawsuit, but they might award it for the actual takedown notice, assuming you can show damages.
What are the SI units for that?
Americans (mostly) don't use SI units. But what is the SI unit to bone damage in a broken leg? What is the SI unit for autism? What is the SI unit that measures impact of an infection on the organism? All these cases are quite easy to quantify.
The term quantify means to assign a number to something. How many autisms does Michelle Dawson have, just to pick a random example?
I wasn't suggesting that courts don't award money for stress. I just found it amusing that you stated that stress is "easy to quantify." Awards for pain and suffering tend to be the subject of controversy precisely because they aren't easy to quantify.
Maybe. That might depend on how it is advertised. In any case, Qualcomm isn't the one advertising this case, so there is no claim for libel.
So I hire an assassin. The assassin commits a crime, and I'm not responsible for inciting and paying for the execution of the crime? Wow.
If Qualcomm pays somebody to advertise a falsehood then they're certainly liable for libel. They aren't doing that in this case.
How are they depriving you of your IP? They're only preventing you from distributing it, unless github was your only copy of it.
Many many tools rely on automated checkout of libraries and components (under FLOSS licensing) from repositories. Having a base library or something like that unaccessible based on false pretext breaks those tools. This may translate on commercial releases that can't be done because further manual integration needs to be done. If I maintain or contribute to one of those tools, and my employer cannot deploy the latest bugfix or our platform because some monkey decided to file a DMCA, I'd bet they'll be having a bad time. And yes, again - this is quite common; OSS maintainers that are paid for what they do and integrate that work into the employer's product line. The notion that a project volunteer is a poor nerd in a basement, while romantic - is generically wrong. They exist, but they are not the majority.
Sure, if a corporation suffers harm they can use, but only for the harm suffered during a few days time.
I doubt that a few github takedowns are really going to impact a professional operation, however. They tend not to use sites like github as part of their core workflow. It mainly gets used by those poor nerds in basements.
As far as criminal charges go - only a prosecutor can seek those, and to date none has done so over a DMCA claim.
A prosecuter is necessary for a public crime. And some crimes are semi-public (they require a lawyer to file the complaint).
There is no criminal remedy to a false DMCA complaint that doesn't require a prosecutor to file. If you have one in mind that I'm not thinking of, let me know. The crime is perjury, and you can't sue somebody for perjury.
If you file a DMCA counter-notice you are potentially inviting a lawsuit.
Crossing the road is also dangerous.
Sure. So is jumping off of a cliff. Therefore, since I cross the road routinely I shoul
I'd say there is a far greater risk of the firework itself having a failure that sends it somewhere unintended, though even that wasn't much of a risk here.
This is a fireworks display over water. The firework round has a certain total amount of energy available to it determined by the amount of propellant inside. The launchers were probably located far enough from crowds that even under the most unfavorable conditions a round could not have hit anybody - that is if the firework were directly aimed at the crowd. A shot deflecting off a UAV will not travel farther than that - just physics.
Maybe if they're launching shells right over a crowd a deflection would cause a problem, but so would a short round.
Read about the new ridiculous rules the FAA imposed about drones.. Then you will understand. Don't you know we are living in a time when someone does something cool, it is automatically illegal?
What rules? I see nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters. A Federal Court has already ruled that all these FAA press releases have no binding power over anybody, dismissing the only case the FAA has brought which has gone to judgement so far.
Federal agencies can't just issue press releases and demand that people follow them. The US is a nation governed by laws, which means the government needs a law or regulation to cite when taking action against somebody.
I don't deny that the FAA has the legal authority to create regulations governing UAVs. They just haven't done it yet.
Besides lost time, the fact that code was unavailable for possible futural employers to look at, the fact that the volunteer was publicly pointed out as a copyright infringer and may not feel comfortable continuing his pet project? Heck, just the stress of it all is quite easy to prove and quantify.
What lost time is there for a volunteer on an FOSS project? The courts do NOT award lost time for responding to the lawsuit, but they might award it for the actual takedown notice, assuming you can show damages.
And I find your claim that it is "easy to prove and quantify" stress amusing. What are the SI units for that?
While the claim itself is perfectly legal, advertising it may constitute libel if the claim is bogus.
Maybe. That might depend on how it is advertised. In any case, Qualcomm isn't the one advertising this case, so there is no claim for libel.
Also, if the files aren't accessible, they are depriving you of your intellectual property, by claiming its theirs. You already have a ton of posts on this thread explaining in detail why when someone states they're the legitimate copyright owner in a DMCA claim when that is false is - by itself - a crime.
How are they depriving you of your IP? They're only preventing you from distributing it, unless github was your only copy of it. Again, it was only down for a few days, so you're going to have to show damage from that short period of unavailability.
As far as criminal charges go - only a prosecutor can seek those, and to date none has done so over a DMCA claim.
The US court system doesn't recognize the burden of having to defend a lawsuit as damages.
There is no lawsuit. There is a DMCA complaint. If it is publicly displayed and its proved wrong, its libel, and grounds for suing. If the DMCA complaint itself violates the law, its grounds for suing. But I'd be very surprised to see Qualcomm taking anyone to court - you see, that kind of move scares away their customers that use Qualcomm code and semiconductors. This is usually settled fast (outside the court system) and silently.
My entire post concerns a lawsuit following a counter-notice. About 8 posts up I said, "As an individual, once you're in court, you lose. A DMCA counternotice is an invitation to sue -- literally, you tell them where you can be sued. Inviting companies with lawyers on staff to sue you is a great way to lose all your money. Regardless of merit." The reply was, "No, it is not. It sounds like a great way to earn a whole bunch of money from somebody who is having repeated brain farts about what the law actually says."
If you file a DMCA counter-notice you are potentially inviting a lawsuit. You stand nothing to gain other than the right to continue distributing the work in question, and a LOT to lose. For somebody not making money off of the distribution, it is a big risk to take.
If Qualcomm's DMCA complaint indicates they believe they actually a specific part of the kernel that's not a BS complaint anymore. That's a legitimate copyright dispute.
Every compliant DMCA complaint includes a statement that the company believes they own the work being distributed. This one certainly does.
People aren't willing to accept responsibility for themselves and their kids. We shouldn't be forcing the companies to accept the responsibility instead. If you don't agree with how Amazon does it, don't buy their devices or use their appstore. If they feel they're losing too many customers based on their business practices.. they'll change them. Either way, they shouldn't be targeted by the FTC.
When I was a kid there wasn't some little box that both let me play games and run up a $1000 credit card bill. In order to spend my parent's money I'd need to get their wallet and drive to a store, or try to order something over the phone (and NOBODY would accept a phone order from some 6 year old). I doubt I'd have any idea what to do with a checkbook at that age.
Sure, I'm all for teaching responsibility, but giving device owners reasonable options for preventing unauthorized access to spending money is just basic sense. The same is true of things like pay-per-view - if some cable company had a big BUY button on the remote control that if you pushed it twice automatically tuned to a PPV station and bought the first thing on the list without an option for a PIN, then you'd see outrage over that as well.
Thanks for the link - haven't watched it yet.
I've always wondered if Galaxies and SMB are both effects from a common cause. We don't understand dark matter, and that is a HUGE gap when it comes to galaxy formation. If there is some kind of primordial force at work that created the large-scale structure of the universe then perhaps SMB are just an extreme manifestation of it. They didn't necessarily form from steller evolution. Maybe at some period in the past if not today there were huge gravitational gradients that just sucked gobs of matter into SMBs and arranged the larger area around it into galaxies. Those forces may no longer be active today, and they may very well have only been active for a short time to have a big impact on large-scale structures.
However, what I don't know is how something like this would affect the CMB/etc, and this sort of thing may have been completely disproven.
I'm using Feedly, but the one thing I really miss from Google Reader is a mark-read-up-to-here feature. If you're using the mobile app it works well enough to have it mark read each page of articles as you swipe by them. However, the web-based reader only lets you mark an entire feed read at a time, which makes it hard to catch up on large feeds.
If Qualcomm files in court (the next step after a DMCA) that it owns copyright on parts of the Linux Kernel (for example) it would need to assert why it believes it is their code.
Sure. If you file a counter-claim one of their lawyers would review the case. If it is airtight for the defense they would most likely not file a lawsuit. However, the defendant still takes on the risk that Qualcomm feels that they have something worth going after.
Maybe Qualcomm feels that whoever submitted the code to the kernel and signed the DCO wasn't authorized to do so. In that case, they may legally retain the copyright. Maybe they do, maybe they don't - only a court can decide that and no court is going to consider filing a suit a nuisance over something like this.
What you want is [not] a replacement for DMCA but a replacement for the entire US civil law system.
No argument there.
They are still liable for the damages caused by their good faith claim. As anyone that is wrongfully accused of a crime.
And what damages exactly does somebody doing volunteer FOSS work have to show?
The site was only down for a few days, and then per the DMCA it goes back up when you file the counter-claim. What damages were caused during that outage?
The US court system doesn't recognize the burden of having to defend a lawsuit as damages.
You could represent yourself in a clear-cut case like this, where the files are obviously properly licensed. If you give them notice of the licensing in your counter-notice, and they still sue, they could get in trouble for filing a frivolous lawsuit, and you could recover damages.
If you don't actually give them evidence of licensing (and not just notice), then they can argue that they never granted you a license and thus they sued. If you pull out a license they can argue that some rogue employee must not have followed procedure. An argument like that might still lose them the case, but probably would get them out of damages.
And representing yourself still means taking off of work, without compensation, and lots of hassle. One does not enter into a lawsuit lightly, especially when there is no financial gain.
You really have a warped sense of the law here. Note, you aren't filing a countersuit here, you are filing a counter-notice and expecting them to file a formal lawsuit against you if they want to continue. They, the guys who filed the original DMCA notice, need to spend their money filing the lawsuit and going before a federal judge to explain why they want to see you in court.
Their goal is to get people to stop posting stuff on websites. They win as soon as their lawsuit makes headlines. Whether they win the court case doesn't matter to them.
Their risk is basically limited to the cost of litigation - something fairly predictable. The defendant's risk is that predictable cost of litigation plus statutory damages (up to $150k per work, though usually much less).
So, Qualcomm gets to decide if spending $50k on a trial is worth the resulting chilling effects on everybody else. They probably gave thought to this before even filing the takedown notice. They could have decided in advance to not file any actual lawsuits, or they could have decided to budget for one or more of them. So, there is a huge company with an army of lawyers that potentially has money budgeted to go after the most promising person who files a counter-notice.
So, when you file that counter-notice you really are risking your home. The best you're going to do is win your case, which gets you absolutely nothing but the ability to keep your files up on Github. If you're really fortunate you get some or all of your legal costs paid, but this is pretty rare in the US (and you still lose years of your life, and probably your job). The only way you come out ahead is by proving malicious intent, which is hard for even prosecutors with huge budgets to pull off.
We can hope that eventually a judge is going to be annoyed and start treating the conscious action that businesses take when issuing a DMCA takedown notice as sufficient for being "knowingly false".
Judges have been getting annoyed at the RIAA for years. The only result has been that the RIAA has been finding it harder to get victories in court. It isn't like judges are locking up their executives for contempt or even awarding attorney costs to the people they sue.
The US doesn't have a loser-pays system. It is pretty rare to have courts award costs, and even if they do award costs the only people who get paid are the lawyers. If you represent yourself you get nothing even if you could have gotten legal costs, and if you have a lawyer you're taking the risk of not getting paid costs and you're out your own time no matter what.
Hold on. Once it goes to court Qualcomm is falsely asserting copyright. That's fraud. There are most certainly damages people have collected against fraudulent claims of wrongdoing. Ask the RIAA or the big banks paying fines for negligent foreclosure filings.
Fraud requires intent, and proving intent is hard. All Qualcomm has to say is that they thought in good faith that they had a valid claim. You have to prove that they knew all along that they had no valid claim. Courts generally tend to take the middle road, which would be denying the claim but not considering it malicious.
The result of this is what Enigma2175 said. You can fight a big expensive battle and prevail, but your only victory is to be able to put your repository back up on Github. Both sides are likely out a lot of money, which was Qualcomm's goal in the first place - everybody else will just fall into line.
If his NDA is written with the standard terminology used in states that allow them, the wording is probably something along the line of "You agree not to take a position for a competitor in a field that specifically compete with what you were doing here". Even if its not worded that way, its historically how they're enforced in the few tech hubs situated in states that have enforced them.
I've never seen that kind of wording in an NDA. Typically they only prevent the disclosure of actual proprietary info. In my industry people move between companies doing very similar jobs all the time. Granted, it might be from being a direct contributor in one company to a manager of the exact same task in another.
But, I don't work in the software industry.
Yup - I'm always amused by construction project management. They closed a road for a year for a bridge expansion, and I think I saw somebody working there maybe one day a week on average.
Non-competes are BS. But requiring employees to not reveal confidential information, poach clients, etc. for their new competing bosses seems like a reasonable and ethical thing to ask. It sounds like Amazon believes he may have crossed this line, beyond simply working for a competitor.
The problem is that you need specific evidence to sue for this. They're suing for a non-compete agreement, which in theory bars working for Google at all and thus has a much lower burden of proof.
NDAs have been around for decades and I don't think anybody has a problem with them. If you write software for company A, you can't give the source code to company B. What is controversial is saying that you can't do anything for company B.
In my industry non-compete agreements are not common, despite there being lots of proprietary information. When you switch employers you can use your skills, but nobody asks anybody what company foo is using in their secret formula, and there is no conflict of interest.
It's marked as a construction zone with increased fines because if someone has an accident in there, it stops up traffic far more than on an open road.
Considering that the area of the road I'm referring to is just as wide as the areas outside the construction zone, I find that unlikely. There is no place to pull off onto the center margin, but there wasn't such a place before they started widening the median either, and it was 65mph at that time.
If drivers such as yourself realised you don't know everything about the road condition, and realised that the way to defeat unfair or improper speed restrictions is in court and not on the road, roads would be safer.
I don't believe I said at any point that I drive over the speed limit.
And nobody is going to start a million dollar lawsuit against the state to change the speed limit in a work zone that will probably be finished up 5 years before litigation is done.
Just because you think the speed limit is incorrect doesn't make it so, and doesn't make it OK to speed.
No, the fact that there are no safety issues in the work zone makes the speed limit incorrect. I never claimed that my personal proclamation should be used as the basis for setting speed limits.
If people drive through a work zone following the limit and find no safety issues, they're likely to ignore the speed limit the next time around. The best way to prevent that is to only display signs when there is actually a safety issue.
Obviously the software is downloading far more than necessary. You can stream 1080p in fairly nice quality with that kind of bandwidth. Unless his screen saver runs at a few frames per second it seems like overkill.