So, vague fears, a couple assertions from Ballmer, and the ridiculous claim that an indemnity agreement is "That agreement is tantamount to Novell saying: 'yes, GNU/Linux does infringe upon Microsoft patents?" It doesn't. People who are pissed off with the idea that anyone would have any dealings with microsoft might want it to say that, but when an indemnity agreement says that if, in the future, one or the other is found to have violated the other's personally-held IP rights, there will not be severe repurcussions. Indemnity agreements, amusingly, are often put into place to protect users, because they encourage stability. As for the spirit of the GPL, that only is true if you consider "spirit" to be "what RMS thinks." There is a reason that this sort of thing is not addressed in the GPL, and RMS's desire to stamp out certain agreements is part of the reason v3 is meeting such strenuous opposition.
Freedom, and all that, you know?
"If a company kills babies, I'm not going to buy their products. In fact I'll actively make others aware of their actions, this is not petty, I would consider it my moral duty. As a geek Novell and Microsoft have done something far worse: gone against the spirit (if not the letter) of the GPL. It is therefore my moral duty to boycott their products and advise everyone (who would know what I'm talking about) to do the same."
And this is the real problem. There is no moral duty. There is no moral imperative regarding software choice. Why do we support OSS? Because we think it is a better way of doing things. this is a utilitarian view. Not a moral one. This is business and productivity, not religion.
Your example is even quite absurd. Are you seriously saying that anyone who ever had dealings with anyone who did something wrong should be branded? The friends of a felon? His family? They had dealings with him even after they knew he was guilty!
How about the government? Lots of senators collaborated with Duke Cunningham, on both sides. Should we toss all of them out of office, now that we know he was one of the most corrupt congressmen in history?
Not only are you trying to assign some sort of bizarre guilt by association, you are claiming you have the moral obligation to do so. This is exactly the problem that I sought to address in my previous post.
This all shows the wonderful practice of choosing systems based on gut reactions and petty politics. If you think SuSE is not as good as Ubuntu, or Fedora, or slackware, and therefore don't use it, good on you. Choice is great.
If you switched, or spend appreciable time bashing or advocating a boycott of SuSE because of the Novell/MS deal, you are a moron. I'm sorry. You aren't making any sort of choice based on the merits of the system, just on politics and the fact that you dislike microsoft. The agreement is harmless to "the community." It's an indemnity agreement! That's about the most benign thing two companies could possibly sign.
The bad part is that the reaction (as we saw here, sometimes humorously disinformed) is unfairly hurting a valid (some would say good) choice in the linux market (choice is good!) and one again painting all of us as petty, politically-driven zealots who care more about bashing MS and anyone who associates with them than what we really are: intelligent people who have made a very smart decision about operating systems. The whole business is thoroughly disappointing.
Consoles and companies don't need "defending." Doing so does not make you some sort of righteous arbiter of gaming justice. If popular opinion is swinging for or against a company, it is because that company is either doing something right or wrong to warrant it. This is how a market works, and defending a company against popular opinion because they "need defending" is actually counterintuitive; consumer dissatisfaction is how companies learn what they are doing wrong, and either correct it or perish.
And South Africa is the largest market in Africa. Wooooo. That does not mean it is nearly as important as... well... anywhere else. Selling in the UK is preferable, but controlling Japan and the USA means controlling the market.
In any case, I am still suspicious of these numbers, mostly because from what I can tell the source ONLY does console launches and seems to rely heavily on company-provided numbers.
So the judge says "you messed up, file an action."
And then they do. And then, the overwhelming likelihood is, she will lose. That's really sticking it to... er... uh... I have no idea. This really is the equivalent of a legal prank, setting things up so you can pop up in the end and say "gotcha!" without anything really changing.
Maybe they can use this massive amount of distributed processing power to come up with a game worth playing.
Really, really. It's the games. Home might be nifty (although also microtransactiony) and this might be a good idea, but neither of these are going to move systems. I get the feeling Sony's treading water, hoping for something to pop up.
Slightly different. If you were under an NDA, you could use the knowledge of the trade secret as part of your work at the other corporation, just not tell them the entirety of your former project.
The two often work in tandem, so employers have all angles covered.
Read the contract. Take it to a lawyer. If you are in california, tell them straight up it's unenforceable and tell them you want it out of the contract because it could be damaging to the rest of the agreement should legal actions arise. Elsewhere, if you absolutely cannot find a lawyer, agree to the non-compete if you can get one of the following:
1) Specific mention of area of effect of the clause. Overly large areas are unenforceable. Look around your area and see if there are other places you could go to more than X miles from the employer.
2) Specific mention of specific competitors in the contract that you could not work for. If the contract has a completeness clause ("this agreement is the complete and final agreement between the parties," if I remember the wording close enough, which bars extrinsic evidence, such as a list), make sure it is in the contract itself, and not just an oral agreement or a typed-up list. Remember that what is said during negotiations likely will not have any effect upon how the contract is interpreted by any court at some (unfortunate) later date. The contract must be ambiguous for that, and non-specific does not mean ambiguous.
The larger the area/more employers, the more money you can ask for in severance during your noncompetitive period. If they try to get you to sign away longer than a year and a half or a couple counties of area, tell them up front that you can't agree to that and it is likely unenforceable. If they disagree, grab a lawyer for an hour and have him call them to tell them that it probably is. Generally, however, these clauses are allowed, and you have to be careful what you sign. Do not agree to a bad covenant not to compete in exchange for a lengthy period of "gauranteed" employment, because the gaurantee is... well... not a gaurantee. Even with a contract, unless it is worded extremely carefully, you are still an employee at will (to forestall questions: contractors are different, as they are not employees).
DO NOT, EVER, just cross out parts of a contract. That will not modify the contract unless the other party specifically agrees to the modification. The physical appearance of the paper is meaningless, as the contract itself is metaphysical. At best, you don't have a contract. At worst, you have a counteroffer that was not accepted by the employer, which may revert to the employer's version. Feel free to cross things out, add things, or whatever on your copy, but you ABSOLUTELY MUST go and specifically bring your concerns to the person you are negotiating with, draft a NEW copy of the contract for you to both review and sign. That is the only right way to do it.
You can't just say "Haha, that's unenforcable!" and then win. They'll take you to court. They'll try to bind you to the agreement. They'll lose, since it's California and these clauses are per se unconstitutional, but they'll still force you to get a lawyer and likely spend as much as you'd gain through bargaining, with a lot of extra hassle.
Secondly, depending upon how the contract is structured, they could probably withhold the extra money anyway. If I were the employer I would make the full contract, then make it subject to any riders agreed to, THEN bring in the noncompete and force the employee to negotiate for the extra money as part of that. The rider would be invalid, and the employee would not even be able to get reliance, because he negotiated it in bad faith. Money goes poof, except this time after MORE court and MORE lawyer.
Even if it were part of the main contract, they could likely get that particular clause (and the extra money) invalidated for the same reasons. Hope you didn't take that extra two weeks of vacation, because if you did you would owe them two weeks' worth of pay.
This is annoying, but not coercive. The main point is that they are free to set the terms of your employment, and you are free to reject them. Importantly, you have a right to be able to work in the industry of your choice (invalidating overbroad DNC agreements), but not at the specific employer of your choice. Secondly, depending upon the contract, even if it does contain a period of employment, he is still likely an at-will employee (as most are), and therefore firing him for not agreeing to part of a contract modification is grounds for dismissal unless there was some sort of Title VII violation.
There is a cause of action called "tortious interference with contract." The thrust of it is that if you actively try to get someone to breach their contract, they actually breach the contract, and the other contracting party suffers damage because of it, then the interferer is liable for the damages they should have reasonably foreseen due to their enticement.
The Register ran an extremely concise rebuttal to that study. To whit: it's crap. I'd be interested to see any other studies, but I am fairly certain that there are none. Sorry I don't have a link, that was all a looong time ago.
Uh, I imagine there is a good faith exception to the manager-firing policy. We don't know, so it is a bit premature to rail against the evil stupid corporation.
This isn't a ban on using a computer any more than forcing them to register their domicile is banning them from living in their house. It's an analogous situation.
This aspect of the DMCA is limited by copyright subject matter. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the dance itself is uncopyrightable due to lack of proper fixation. I may be wrong, but I remember it being very difficult to get a copyright for something like that (or at least, to defend one).
Slashdot Mirror
So, vague fears, a couple assertions from Ballmer, and the ridiculous claim that an indemnity agreement is "That agreement is tantamount to Novell saying: 'yes, GNU/Linux does infringe upon Microsoft patents?" It doesn't. People who are pissed off with the idea that anyone would have any dealings with microsoft might want it to say that, but when an indemnity agreement says that if, in the future, one or the other is found to have violated the other's personally-held IP rights, there will not be severe repurcussions. Indemnity agreements, amusingly, are often put into place to protect users, because they encourage stability. As for the spirit of the GPL, that only is true if you consider "spirit" to be "what RMS thinks." There is a reason that this sort of thing is not addressed in the GPL, and RMS's desire to stamp out certain agreements is part of the reason v3 is meeting such strenuous opposition.
Freedom, and all that, you know?
"If a company kills babies, I'm not going to buy their products. In fact I'll actively make others aware of their actions, this is not petty, I would consider it my moral duty. As a geek Novell and Microsoft have done something far worse: gone against the spirit (if not the letter) of the GPL. It is therefore my moral duty to boycott their products and advise everyone (who would know what I'm talking about) to do the same."
And this is the real problem. There is no moral duty. There is no moral imperative regarding software choice. Why do we support OSS? Because we think it is a better way of doing things. this is a utilitarian view. Not a moral one. This is business and productivity, not religion.
Your example is even quite absurd. Are you seriously saying that anyone who ever had dealings with anyone who did something wrong should be branded? The friends of a felon? His family? They had dealings with him even after they knew he was guilty!
How about the government? Lots of senators collaborated with Duke Cunningham, on both sides. Should we toss all of them out of office, now that we know he was one of the most corrupt congressmen in history?
Not only are you trying to assign some sort of bizarre guilt by association, you are claiming you have the moral obligation to do so. This is exactly the problem that I sought to address in my previous post.
This all shows the wonderful practice of choosing systems based on gut reactions and petty politics. If you think SuSE is not as good as Ubuntu, or Fedora, or slackware, and therefore don't use it, good on you. Choice is great.
If you switched, or spend appreciable time bashing or advocating a boycott of SuSE because of the Novell/MS deal, you are a moron. I'm sorry. You aren't making any sort of choice based on the merits of the system, just on politics and the fact that you dislike microsoft. The agreement is harmless to "the community." It's an indemnity agreement! That's about the most benign thing two companies could possibly sign.
The bad part is that the reaction (as we saw here, sometimes humorously disinformed) is unfairly hurting a valid (some would say good) choice in the linux market (choice is good!) and one again painting all of us as petty, politically-driven zealots who care more about bashing MS and anyone who associates with them than what we really are: intelligent people who have made a very smart decision about operating systems. The whole business is thoroughly disappointing.
I think this thread should be considered an extreme fire hazard; I haven't seen this many straw men since the last presidential election.
Uh, can we say "margin of error?" It's like stupid presidential election polls all over again....
Consoles and companies don't need "defending." Doing so does not make you some sort of righteous arbiter of gaming justice. If popular opinion is swinging for or against a company, it is because that company is either doing something right or wrong to warrant it. This is how a market works, and defending a company against popular opinion because they "need defending" is actually counterintuitive; consumer dissatisfaction is how companies learn what they are doing wrong, and either correct it or perish.
And South Africa is the largest market in Africa. Wooooo. That does not mean it is nearly as important as... well... anywhere else. Selling in the UK is preferable, but controlling Japan and the USA means controlling the market.
In any case, I am still suspicious of these numbers, mostly because from what I can tell the source ONLY does console launches and seems to rely heavily on company-provided numbers.
So the judge says "you messed up, file an action."
And then they do. And then, the overwhelming likelihood is, she will lose. That's really sticking it to... er... uh... I have no idea. This really is the equivalent of a legal prank, setting things up so you can pop up in the end and say "gotcha!" without anything really changing.
Go team.
Maybe they can use this massive amount of distributed processing power to come up with a game worth playing.
Really, really. It's the games. Home might be nifty (although also microtransactiony) and this might be a good idea, but neither of these are going to move systems. I get the feeling Sony's treading water, hoping for something to pop up.
Slightly different. If you were under an NDA, you could use the knowledge of the trade secret as part of your work at the other corporation, just not tell them the entirety of your former project.
The two often work in tandem, so employers have all angles covered.
Remember, I am not your lawyer.
Read the contract. Take it to a lawyer. If you are in california, tell them straight up it's unenforceable and tell them you want it out of the contract because it could be damaging to the rest of the agreement should legal actions arise. Elsewhere, if you absolutely cannot find a lawyer, agree to the non-compete if you can get one of the following:
1) Specific mention of area of effect of the clause. Overly large areas are unenforceable. Look around your area and see if there are other places you could go to more than X miles from the employer.
2) Specific mention of specific competitors in the contract that you could not work for. If the contract has a completeness clause ("this agreement is the complete and final agreement between the parties," if I remember the wording close enough, which bars extrinsic evidence, such as a list), make sure it is in the contract itself, and not just an oral agreement or a typed-up list. Remember that what is said during negotiations likely will not have any effect upon how the contract is interpreted by any court at some (unfortunate) later date. The contract must be ambiguous for that, and non-specific does not mean ambiguous.
The larger the area/more employers, the more money you can ask for in severance during your noncompetitive period. If they try to get you to sign away longer than a year and a half or a couple counties of area, tell them up front that you can't agree to that and it is likely unenforceable. If they disagree, grab a lawyer for an hour and have him call them to tell them that it probably is. Generally, however, these clauses are allowed, and you have to be careful what you sign. Do not agree to a bad covenant not to compete in exchange for a lengthy period of "gauranteed" employment, because the gaurantee is... well... not a gaurantee. Even with a contract, unless it is worded extremely carefully, you are still an employee at will (to forestall questions: contractors are different, as they are not employees).
DO NOT, EVER, just cross out parts of a contract. That will not modify the contract unless the other party specifically agrees to the modification. The physical appearance of the paper is meaningless, as the contract itself is metaphysical. At best, you don't have a contract. At worst, you have a counteroffer that was not accepted by the employer, which may revert to the employer's version. Feel free to cross things out, add things, or whatever on your copy, but you ABSOLUTELY MUST go and specifically bring your concerns to the person you are negotiating with, draft a NEW copy of the contract for you to both review and sign. That is the only right way to do it.
"per se invalid," not "per se unconstitutional." It's too early for right me to think.
You can't just say "Haha, that's unenforcable!" and then win. They'll take you to court. They'll try to bind you to the agreement. They'll lose, since it's California and these clauses are per se unconstitutional, but they'll still force you to get a lawyer and likely spend as much as you'd gain through bargaining, with a lot of extra hassle.
Secondly, depending upon how the contract is structured, they could probably withhold the extra money anyway. If I were the employer I would make the full contract, then make it subject to any riders agreed to, THEN bring in the noncompete and force the employee to negotiate for the extra money as part of that. The rider would be invalid, and the employee would not even be able to get reliance, because he negotiated it in bad faith. Money goes poof, except this time after MORE court and MORE lawyer.
Even if it were part of the main contract, they could likely get that particular clause (and the extra money) invalidated for the same reasons. Hope you didn't take that extra two weeks of vacation, because if you did you would owe them two weeks' worth of pay.
This is annoying, but not coercive. The main point is that they are free to set the terms of your employment, and you are free to reject them. Importantly, you have a right to be able to work in the industry of your choice (invalidating overbroad DNC agreements), but not at the specific employer of your choice. Secondly, depending upon the contract, even if it does contain a period of employment, he is still likely an at-will employee (as most are), and therefore firing him for not agreeing to part of a contract modification is grounds for dismissal unless there was some sort of Title VII violation.
Good thought, but it wouldn't hold up.
Not all of them. Just certain (what the legislature considers overly-broad) examples. The only state that outright bars them is California.
Sniper in the petit jury! Second Chair down! Repeat, second chair down! Can't count on the judge- he's 12 and his mom called him down for dinner!
There is a cause of action called "tortious interference with contract." The thrust of it is that if you actively try to get someone to breach their contract, they actually breach the contract, and the other contracting party suffers damage because of it, then the interferer is liable for the damages they should have reasonably foreseen due to their enticement.
Of course it is. Friend Computer would never consort with evil mutant commie traitors. To think otherwise would be the height of treason.
The Register ran an extremely concise rebuttal to that study. To whit: it's crap. I'd be interested to see any other studies, but I am fairly certain that there are none. Sorry I don't have a link, that was all a looong time ago.
Unfortunately, I don't think the script will help you with that.
See, there are no moral rights in the US. The only thing that comes close is VARA, and that is very bare-bones.
Uh, I imagine there is a good faith exception to the manager-firing policy. We don't know, so it is a bit premature to rail against the evil stupid corporation.
Or we could, you know, all work together.
What a CRAZY idea!
His level of involvement in the scheme, whether or not he took a leadership role, his prior convictions.
This isn't a ban on using a computer any more than forcing them to register their domicile is banning them from living in their house. It's an analogous situation.
This aspect of the DMCA is limited by copyright subject matter. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the dance itself is uncopyrightable due to lack of proper fixation. I may be wrong, but I remember it being very difficult to get a copyright for something like that (or at least, to defend one).