Jason Schultz (staff attorney the EFF) has some figures in his blog. He reckons the figure is just over 15% of students using the (crippled) service. ISTR you can't play the music anymore once you leave Penn State. A ringing endorsement for sure!
The point is, these subpoenas are issued with little specificty and the targets of them don't find out about them until their ISP informs them. If you are being accused of a crime, you should have the right to discover what the accusations are and to defend yourself. Apart from the rather trollish fact that you compare the copying of music with serious sexual interference with kids, a child molester would be formally charged with a crime before being commanded to appear in court. So he gets a chance to defend himself. The RIAA subpoenas didn't allow that luxury to the targets of them...
Even if there are lines of code that are SCO's trade secret in Linux, and IBM improperly disclosed them, the most that could happen is that IBM pays damages to SCO (aside from tainted reputations etc.) Trade secrets are like virginity (a subject the average/.er should know a lot about;-) as once you've lost it, you can't get it back. SCO's "trade secrets" are revealed and they could stay in Linux unless it was literal copying and thus infringement. But this is so hypothetical: there are no trade secrets left in System V as (a) every man and his dog has licensed the code and (b) open-source BSD does every SVR4 does and more.
...in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (1991). Fesit copied portions of Rural's phone directory to create their own, competing product after Rural refused permission to use it. The Court noted that "sweat of the brow" (i.e. effort alone) is not sufficient to justify copyright protection: there must be an element of creativity as well, and arranging the entries in alphabetical order is not creativity.
I'm not a USian but this seems a useful thing to quote in your letters to Congress critters...
This latest proposal, along with all the others from the DMA, is worthless. Firstly it's based on opt-out principles which just cannot work (why: read this). Secondly, there's nothing about WHO can opt out. Recalling SafeEPS vs. E-MPS, the former allowed entire domains to opt-out but the latter, promoted by the DMA themselves, did not allow for this. Many small domains have their mail exchangers set up to route all mail to "unknown" users to say, the postmaster and one can have an infinite number of unknown users.
Of course the DMA has one very good reason to continually promote opt-out: they fear that if they moved to opt-in that no-one would opt-in and they will go out of business (well, that's just too bad - no-one should be forced to read adverts they don't want). We can also note that Empire Towers, SAMCO, Alan Ralsky and all the other spammer scum listed at The Register of Known Spam Operations are of course members of the DMA and will follow its guidelines in full. Not.
BBC DVD releases are usually regions 2 and 4. The reason for this (more specifically, no region 1) is because BBC Worldwide handles the marketing of BBC video releases in the UK and Australia/NZ. However for the US it sub-licences the rights and BBC video releases are issued by Warner, who decide their own release schedule. It's because of this contract that the discs employ region coding to "prevent" them being played in the US.
Although you can import the release and use a region-free player, remember you will need a PAL (or dual-standard) TV set and these are AFAIK less common in the US than they are in Europe! This applies even if using a computer DVD drive to play the disc, unless you just want to view it on your monitor.
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Jason Schultz (staff attorney the EFF) has some figures in his blog. He reckons the figure is just over 15% of students using the (crippled) service. ISTR you can't play the music anymore once you leave Penn State. A ringing endorsement for sure!
The point is, these subpoenas are issued with little specificty and the targets of them don't find out about them until their ISP informs them. If you are being accused of a crime, you should have the right to discover what the accusations are and to defend yourself. Apart from the rather trollish fact that you compare the copying of music with serious sexual interference with kids, a child molester would be formally charged with a crime before being commanded to appear in court. So he gets a chance to defend himself. The RIAA subpoenas didn't allow that luxury to the targets of them...
Even if there are lines of code that are SCO's trade secret in Linux, and IBM improperly disclosed them, the most that could happen is that IBM pays damages to SCO (aside from tainted reputations etc.) Trade secrets are like virginity (a subject the average /.er should know a lot about ;-) as once you've lost it, you can't get it back. SCO's "trade secrets" are revealed and they could stay in Linux unless it was literal copying and thus infringement. But this is so hypothetical: there are no trade secrets left in System V as (a) every man and his dog has licensed the code and (b) open-source BSD does every SVR4 does and more.
...in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (1991). Fesit copied portions of Rural's phone directory to create their own, competing product after Rural refused permission to use it. The Court noted that "sweat of the brow" (i.e. effort alone) is not sufficient to justify copyright protection: there must be an element of creativity as well, and arranging the entries in alphabetical order is not creativity. I'm not a USian but this seems a useful thing to quote in your letters to Congress critters...
Of course the DMA has one very good reason to continually promote opt-out: they fear that if they moved to opt-in that no-one would opt-in and they will go out of business (well, that's just too bad - no-one should be forced to read adverts they don't want). We can also note that Empire Towers, SAMCO, Alan Ralsky and all the other spammer scum listed at The Register of Known Spam Operations are of course members of the DMA and will follow its guidelines in full. Not.
BBC DVD releases are usually regions 2 and 4. The reason for this (more specifically, no region 1) is because BBC Worldwide handles the marketing of BBC video releases in the UK and Australia/NZ. However for the US it sub-licences the rights and BBC video releases are issued by Warner, who decide their own release schedule. It's because of this contract that the discs employ region coding to "prevent" them being played in the US. Although you can import the release and use a region-free player, remember you will need a PAL (or dual-standard) TV set and these are AFAIK less common in the US than they are in Europe! This applies even if using a computer DVD drive to play the disc, unless you just want to view it on your monitor.