Yeah, I can't believe nobody's commented yet on this, because it sounds an awful lot like the Realm. Sure, Harsh Realm got cancelled pretty fast, but c'mon, we're geeks - we're supposed to remember stuff like this.
Omar Santiago could kick Patton's ass while outplotting Machiavelli simultaneously. Great character, good show, but it really only showed what it could do on the new york episode where we finally see what made the Realm the realm.
Allegedly coming to DVD this year (as is Millennium), though Scott Bairstow's recent history wouldn't help speed its release.
"In the economic sense" includes the ethical, moral and legal, to the extent that any of these affect the bottom line.
If people's ethical and moral qualms don't actually affect their purchasing patterns, why mention them? Running a certain business may be contrary to one person's ethics or morality, such that they place a greater value on not going to hell than on the profit made. If the operator of the business has no such qualms, the only real factor is legality (IOW, our collective normative view of the propriety of the business type).
Legal concerns are a valid economic factor - the cost of litigation, legal defences, fines, risk of prison, all should be (and are) factored in to a proper economic analysis of any business. Don't agree? Ask long haul truckers about compliance with standards about hours worked. Ask the mafia about - well, everything. Ask every big company in the world about compliance with environmental standards. Whenever it is cheaper to break the law than obey it, people will.
It will also limit and define the scope of discovery, too. Once you know what lines are alleged to infringe, you know who wrote them when, why, how, how, etc., and what docs you likely have on the matter, and what witnesses are probably relevant.
Well yeah, but the idea is, if terrorists did blow up SCO's servers, SCO would be like 'hey, don't say we never warned you' should the investors try to sue. Forget about tighter security on the server farm, SCO could legitimately say 'look people, we warned you, presumably the risk of terrorist attack was factored into the share price by the market. So @#$! off whining about it.'
That's why form 10s have so many caveats and warnings.
Karma whore help me out - there is a law against the abuse of the legal system in overusing lawsuits, isn't there? The RIAA is practically using form letters to send them out.
Yes, there are rules against abusing the legal system, but merely filing a bunch of lawsuits isn't in and of itself abusive, nor is using form letters. It's not how many lawsuits you file, it's whether the parties named are proper parties and whether you have a case or not. There's nothing at all wrong with suing thousands or tens of thousands of people, so long as they've actually done something to you.
You'll be hard pressed to find a lawyer anywhere that doesn't use form letters or form pleadings. Lawyers LOVE precedents and HATE drafting things from scratch. A precedent that you've already used a dozen times before (and won with) is a whole lot better than a newly drafted document never tested by the courts.
Similarly, no client wants you spending hundreds of dollars an hour drafting and redrafting a simple letter - if you have a form letter that your assistant can put the numbers and names into in five minutes, save your client some money and spend the time you save on strategy.
The trick is to make sure you do actually update the form and precedent to fit the situation. There've been a lot of lost deals and suits because people used precedents without understanding them or reading them carefully.
Just my opinion - I could be wrong, and probably am in your jurisdiction.
That's actually part of the point of IP in the first place - to make it easier to contract in respect of it.
Before IP was recognized as, well, intellectual property, how did you sell it? We make things property to make them easier to alienate - to sell, or trade away.
Compare a trade secret with a patent - you can sell a license to use a patent to anyone and only have to worry about getting a fair price. Sell access to one of your trade secrets and you need to do everything short of DNA testing on the purchaser, because if they deliberately or negligently let those secrets out into the wild, you're screwed. As we all know, security through obscurity is a really bad idea. By creating legal protections for clever ideas, those ideas can be more widely and more freely traded.
Good point about multiple people being involved, but it doesn't really change things. A firm could be as incompetent and shady as could an individual, and requiring designations enforces standards regardless.
Pilots and bus drivers need special licenses. The differences between those and a P.Eng are mainly in how you get qualify for the license, not in the nature of the regulation.
The regulation of firemen and soldiers is redundant as there are (broadly speaking) neither private fire services nor private armies and therefore the government can regulate these actors through the hiring and employee management process without requiring laws.
You also have to add in the costs of retrofitting where a deficient and dangerous design is caught before collapse. Human life isn't the only cost in the equation.
Credentials are important in these areas because market forces have trouble working where the differences between suppliers are largely invisible to lay people. I don't know enough about civil engineering to know whether the guy I'm considering hiring to build a building is spouting garbage or is a genius, and my information cost to find out is huge. Having a government prescribed P.Eng requirement means I don't have to ask as many questions and do as much digging when hiring a professional. Same with doctors, lawyers, accountants - by the time you know enough to tell whether the guy is brilliant or the legal or medical equivalent of a script kiddie claiming to be 133t with mad skillz, you probably don't need his help anymore.
Out of all the professions, engineers have the ability to kill the most people in the least amount of time through incompetence. A doctor can only kill one patient at a time, a lawyer can only get a handful of co-defendants on death row at once, and an accountant can only kill people if they jump out their window because of his bad advice. But, a guy who is an "engineer" and doesn't know hiw head from his ass can design a house/dam/building/bridge/etc. that can kill rather a lot of people. And those people probably weren't the ones who hired the engineer, so they don't really have any way of knowing what his credentials are when they decide if they want to use the bridge, live near the dam, etc.
If you put all your assets into a corporation and then get sued for something, you're right that it would be harder for the plaintiff to go after the corporation's assets. Unless the corporation participated in the act and was therefore liable... did you use your computer to download that song? you did? That computer belongs to John Doe Ltd, I see. Well, JDL ought to have stopped you doing that. They're now a defendant too.
Even if they just go after you, they can go after all your assets... like those shares in your holding company. So unless you want to shelter your holding company shares by giving them to someone else (who you'd better trust with your life), you're not much further ahead. What some do is put the company offshore, or use complicated structures like panamanian foundations or quasi-trusts like stiftungs in liechtenstein, but usually a determined plaintifff (like say, the IRS) can get the money anyhow.
You've got to be kidding. Okay, IANAL when it comes to US securities laws or IP, but I've gotta say, I don't think you need to be to see that this is nuts.
Sure, you or I or anybody can incorporate a company dirt cheap... but what you can't do is offer the shares in that company to the public, not without complying with securities laws, and if the company isn't public and widely traded, the entire business model collapses. The transaction costs of a prospectus and other docs are non-trivial, and the usual exemptions for penny stocks contemplate sophisticated investors. Here, by definition you want to be selling to 14 year olds. Which brings up the problem of how you contract to sell securities to minors, but I digress. The cost of being a public company is anything but "minimal" or "free". Have a look at the average 10SB sometime and then figure out what it cost them to put that together, and then to file the regular updates. And the costs of tracking shareholders are far from minimal when you're selling probably one (and only one) share to every college student in america, and your whole legal plan is making sure they have that share and don't sell it. Oh yeah, and having DRM to auto-delete the music if they trade their stock. That'll be fun code to write.
The handwaving he does about stock splitting is also appallingly clueless about real world economic issues. Here's a hint: splitting 100,000 shares at $20 into 200,000 at $10 doesn't magically create income for ANYONE, Bob. Unless there's some sort of buying frenzy going on driving up the price, this isn't going to make you any money. If there IS such a buying frenzy, why the F@#! wouldn't you issue more shares from treasury and capture some more of that cash for the company's purposes? The Cringely plan means that the company better not need more than $2M in capital EVER, as it involves a single offering and then endless dilution. That cashflow better be rock solid, Bob.
We won't even get into the ludicrous fair-use interpretation. There's not a hope in hell any court would find that scheme legal. First off, it's transparently a copyright infringement scheme. You're making *multiple copies* of each of those million CDs, and FOR MONEY giving those copies to your shareholders. Ask bootleggers of M$ products how well incorporation of the company doing the copying helped them stay out of jail/the poorhouse.
Making everybody a shareholder is laughable. So what? Shareholders DO NOT own the assets of the company - they own the residual rights to the assets of the company. You cannot buy a share of M$, walk into Bill G's office, check out his stuff and then say you're exchanging your share certificate for his stapler. All your share entitles you to are dividends and to a pro rata share of the assets if/when the company is wound up BUT NOT BEFORE then.
But *why* does it matter if Twain intended that connection, so long as others find it to be present? If you look at marxist and feminist critical theory in particular, the things that authors didn't know or didn't intend their stories to reveal may say more about the tale, the author and society than what they actually meant to imply.
I never bought that a rescue mission wasn't possible. If they knew that Columbia would burn up, they would've found a solution. 1,000,000 engineers across the country, including all 10,000+ Aerospace engineers in this country would have been working on solutions. We would've figured it out, and it would have been much more clever than the limited scenario they have reightfully been exploring.
Adding more manpower doesn't change the laws of physics, nor those of biology. Water, power, oxygen and CO2 are the problems. How long would the fuel cells last, how long would the CO2 last, can they recycle enough water to last for a few weeks?
A resupply mission is out of the question, because they could never prep another shuttle to actually try a rescue in time. So you get one trip up, and have to bring them all back. And you've got two weeks (at most) to come up with and implement the plan, using a ship that has the same design flaw as the one currently doomed in orbit. Not a good scenario.
As I understand it, and its been a while since I did physics, Columbia had waaaaaay too little fuel to get to the ISS from the orbit it was in. Columbia couldn't have docked with it in any event. I'm not aware of any docking mechanism if they had got Atlantis up to meet it, so the only way to get the Columbia crew off the orbiter was for each and every one of them to space walk over to Atlantis, assuming Atlantis had the capability to carry that many people home.
So they might've launched Atlantis - what difference would it have made?
Yes, they tried arguing this and WON. Read the FCTD decision at
Excerpts:
[44] In early 2000 Dr. Downey arranged for a grow-out test of the sample provided by Mr. Mitchell from seeds retained from the 1997 sample. Mr. Schmeiser and his counsel were invited to be present at commencement of the test. There were differences in the testimony of Dr. Downey and Mr. Schmeiser about the presence of cleaver seeds among the sample seeds. All seeds in the sample provided to Dr. Downey were planted. The grow-out test of the seeds resulted in about 50% of the seeds germinating. The subsequent application of Roundup herbicide left surviving all of the plants which germinated from the seed, demonstrating they were glyphosate tolerant. This led Dr. Downey to conclude that the seeds provided to him from the 1997 sample taken of plants growing along the road allowances of fields 2 and 5, demonstrated that the canola plants growing there were not the result of pollen movement into those fields, or out crossing between glyphosate-resistant and susceptible plants. Rather, in his view, the high percentage of glyphosate-tolerant plants, among those which had germinated, indicated they were grown from commercial Roundup Ready canola seed.
[146] I find on a balance of probabilities that the growing by the defendants in 1998 of canola on nine fields, from seed saved in 1997 which was known or ought to have been known by them to be Roundup tolerant, and the harvesting and sale of that canola crop, infringed upon the plaintiffs' exclusive rights under Canadian patent number 1, 313, 830 in particular claims 1, 2, 5, 6, 22, 23, 27, 28 and 45 of the patent.
Actually, the court found that the overall resistance was so high that the only explanation was that it was the roundup resistant plants which had been deliberately planted and it was the non gm canola which had accidentally contaminated the crop. The Court found there was no way the GM crop could be explained as accidental contamination. Now, I suppose someone could have snuck onto the guys property at night, taken an unseeded field and planted it with GM canola just so they could then proceed to sue him, but that strikes me as a weeee bit unlikely.
Pleadings aren't made under oath, so nothing contained in them can be perjury. If you deliberately state facts you know to be false, however, you could run into civil liability for abuse of process.
How the heck can no one have mentioned Halperin?
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
James Halperin wrote a book called The Truth Machine in the 1990s. Waaaaay out there and politically implausible, but the world of zero privacy it envisions is potentially around the corner.
Halperin shows the implications - business negotiations take minutes for multimillion dollar deals (just ask the guy on the box what his real squeal point is on the deal and whether that really is a deal breaker or not), the justice system is streamlined down to almost nothing (trials don't take very long, obviously), etc.
Blurb from the book website: http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/promo/truthmachi ne/
One of the most influential businessmen in the world, Harvard graduate and software prodigy Randall Armstrong, has one goal: to build a machine that can detect lies with 100 percent accuracy. But aside from assuring the guilt in death-row cases, the device has broad implications for a planet on a collision course with self-destruction.
Once perfected, the Truth Machine changes the face of the world. Most lawyers find themselves looking for new, productive jobs as crime, violent behavior, and court cases are eliminated, virtually overnight. Individuals are truth-tested for civil litigation and mediation. Political candidates must be perfectly frank, no longer relying on popular opinion polls or harboring hidden agendas. Refusal to submit to the Truth Machine brands a politician un-electable. Through a series of simple questions, the Truth Machine can diagnose mental illness with astonishing success.
As its use spreads from courtroom to politics, to diplomacy, business, science, education, and finally into every home throughout the world, the Truth Machine reshapes the very nature of humanity. But ultimately, the fate of the earth rests with humankind. Are we up to the challenge?
Well, if it's a condo, unless 50% (or whatever your condo bylaws say) of the people at the meeting vote for it, it ain't happening in the first place.
Man, I wouldn't trust a condo board with something like providing me internet connectivity for love nor money... I don't feel like putting network issues up for a popular vote or trusting the condo board to "get it" when it's time to allocate funds for equipment, maintenance, etc. Unless you're going to hire somebody to maintain it, or get yourself a contract, do you really want to be the free tech support guy for *160* users who know where you live.
absurd as a billion or trillion dollar verdict may be, the simple fact is that (IIRC) there are statutory damages for copyright infringement in the US that don't require proof of damage. From there on, it's just simple math - max damages x files copied = ~US GDP.
Crypto won't help in the courts - it comes down to coughing up the passwords, or being introduced to your new cell-mate Tiny.
Even if they don't jail you, in civil trials you can draw negative inferences from failures to produce - basically, if somebody won't cough up a document, the court can just assume that it says the worst about the party which didn't cough it up. Which is probably true.
I don't know about the printscreen thing - Palladium + encrypted DRM-savvy DVI outputs and nobody's taking a screen capture of anything.
Sure, the SEC can send you to federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison and take your profits, but don't forget all the investors who lost money can launch a multimillion dollar class action against you, and since the SEC already took your profits, they're coming after the money you earned legitimately, or at least on scams nobody caught on to yet.
No, only a certain group of privacy advocates suggest that personal information be considered proprietary.
There is another group which suggests that making one's personal information a form of property is the single most privacy destructive legal development we could possibly create.
The entire purpose of creating property rights in something is to make it easier to alienate those rights for valuable consideration. Look at IP. What's a trade secret worth? Well, you can use it to make $$$. Can you sell it? Not really, and if you try you're taking horrible risks. Now, patent that sucker and copyright that code. Can you sell those? You betcha, you can license those to your hearts content.
Make our personal information proprietary and we'll all end up selling our personae to M$ or McDonalds and having to pay royalties to use our own names.
As a matter of jurisprudential theory, judges don't "create" the common law, they "discover" or "reveal" it.
For example, the common law related to computer intrusions wasn't created, it was revealed as an adjunct of tort law topics like trespass to chattels and was simply undiscovered until we needed it.
Similarly, ruling on whether one can libel via BBS was merely a matter of revealing portions of the common law which hadn't been discovered yet before the advent of modern technology.
Hey, I'm not the one who made this philosophy up, don't look at me.
Re: the "nightmare" of self-respresented litigants
on
Democracy in the Dark?
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· Score: 1
I agree - it's always nice to see the little guy stand up for himself and fight for his rights. At the same time, it's really hard on the folks trying to respond to his complaints because the case never goes smoothly.
One of the most valuable (and most limited) resources in our society is court time and the rules are there to insure that when parties arrive at the bar they are ready so that we won't all end up back there again two weeks later on the same issue, or don't have to call off a hearing after an hour of argument when someone realizes they forgot to do something or one side is surprised due to lack of notice.
It's not so much one-upping as saying 'hey, hold on, I'm entitled to X and you've got to do X before we go in front of a judge according to Rule Y(Z). There's no point in showing up at court if I haven't got X because I can't possibly respond to your application/case/whatever without that important notice/document/evidence/etc. So, give it to me by the end of the day or call off the hearing - if you don't, you'll lose for failing to comply with the rules.'
And yes, it's unfortunate there's so much procedural law, but without it you just end up asking the court for directions all the time, which bogs the system down worse than having to take a bunch of procedural steps.
Well, my call date is 2003, but I am indeed of the bar.
Little things like having both witnesses in the room at the same time when you sign it; making a bequest to a witness (granted, only invalidates the particular gift); holograph wills; I'm sure you know a lot more ways to screw up a will that aren't immediately obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Omar Santiago could kick Patton's ass while outplotting Machiavelli simultaneously. Great character, good show, but it really only showed what it could do on the new york episode where we finally see what made the Realm the realm.
Allegedly coming to DVD this year (as is Millennium), though Scott Bairstow's recent history wouldn't help speed its release.
If people's ethical and moral qualms don't actually affect their purchasing patterns, why mention them? Running a certain business may be contrary to one person's ethics or morality, such that they place a greater value on not going to hell than on the profit made. If the operator of the business has no such qualms, the only real factor is legality (IOW, our collective normative view of the propriety of the business type). Legal concerns are a valid economic factor - the cost of litigation, legal defences, fines, risk of prison, all should be (and are) factored in to a proper economic analysis of any business. Don't agree? Ask long haul truckers about compliance with standards about hours worked. Ask the mafia about - well, everything. Ask every big company in the world about compliance with environmental standards. Whenever it is cheaper to break the law than obey it, people will.
It will also limit and define the scope of discovery, too. Once you know what lines are alleged to infringe, you know who wrote them when, why, how, how, etc., and what docs you likely have on the matter, and what witnesses are probably relevant.
That's why form 10s have so many caveats and warnings.
You'll be hard pressed to find a lawyer anywhere that doesn't use form letters or form pleadings. Lawyers LOVE precedents and HATE drafting things from scratch. A precedent that you've already used a dozen times before (and won with) is a whole lot better than a newly drafted document never tested by the courts.
Similarly, no client wants you spending hundreds of dollars an hour drafting and redrafting a simple letter - if you have a form letter that your assistant can put the numbers and names into in five minutes, save your client some money and spend the time you save on strategy.
The trick is to make sure you do actually update the form and precedent to fit the situation. There've been a lot of lost deals and suits because people used precedents without understanding them or reading them carefully.
Just my opinion - I could be wrong, and probably am in your jurisdiction.
Before IP was recognized as, well, intellectual property, how did you sell it? We make things property to make them easier to alienate - to sell, or trade away.
Compare a trade secret with a patent - you can sell a license to use a patent to anyone and only have to worry about getting a fair price. Sell access to one of your trade secrets and you need to do everything short of DNA testing on the purchaser, because if they deliberately or negligently let those secrets out into the wild, you're screwed. As we all know, security through obscurity is a really bad idea. By creating legal protections for clever ideas, those ideas can be more widely and more freely traded.
The regulation of firemen and soldiers is redundant as there are (broadly speaking) neither private fire services nor private armies and therefore the government can regulate these actors through the hiring and employee management process without requiring laws.
You also have to add in the costs of retrofitting where a deficient and dangerous design is caught before collapse. Human life isn't the only cost in the equation.
Credentials are important in these areas because market forces have trouble working where the differences between suppliers are largely invisible to lay people. I don't know enough about civil engineering to know whether the guy I'm considering hiring to build a building is spouting garbage or is a genius, and my information cost to find out is huge. Having a government prescribed P.Eng requirement means I don't have to ask as many questions and do as much digging when hiring a professional. Same with doctors, lawyers, accountants - by the time you know enough to tell whether the guy is brilliant or the legal or medical equivalent of a script kiddie claiming to be 133t with mad skillz, you probably don't need his help anymore.
Out of all the professions, engineers have the ability to kill the most people in the least amount of time through incompetence. A doctor can only kill one patient at a time, a lawyer can only get a handful of co-defendants on death row at once, and an accountant can only kill people if they jump out their window because of his bad advice. But, a guy who is an "engineer" and doesn't know hiw head from his ass can design a house/dam/building/bridge/etc. that can kill rather a lot of people. And those people probably weren't the ones who hired the engineer, so they don't really have any way of knowing what his credentials are when they decide if they want to use the bridge, live near the dam, etc.
Even if they just go after you, they can go after all your assets... like those shares in your holding company. So unless you want to shelter your holding company shares by giving them to someone else (who you'd better trust with your life), you're not much further ahead. What some do is put the company offshore, or use complicated structures like panamanian foundations or quasi-trusts like stiftungs in liechtenstein, but usually a determined plaintifff (like say, the IRS) can get the money anyhow.
Sure, you or I or anybody can incorporate a company dirt cheap... but what you can't do is offer the shares in that company to the public, not without complying with securities laws, and if the company isn't public and widely traded, the entire business model collapses. The transaction costs of a prospectus and other docs are non-trivial, and the usual exemptions for penny stocks contemplate sophisticated investors. Here, by definition you want to be selling to 14 year olds. Which brings up the problem of how you contract to sell securities to minors, but I digress. The cost of being a public company is anything but "minimal" or "free". Have a look at the average 10SB sometime and then figure out what it cost them to put that together, and then to file the regular updates. And the costs of tracking shareholders are far from minimal when you're selling probably one (and only one) share to every college student in america, and your whole legal plan is making sure they have that share and don't sell it. Oh yeah, and having DRM to auto-delete the music if they trade their stock. That'll be fun code to write.
The handwaving he does about stock splitting is also appallingly clueless about real world economic issues. Here's a hint: splitting 100,000 shares at $20 into 200,000 at $10 doesn't magically create income for ANYONE, Bob. Unless there's some sort of buying frenzy going on driving up the price, this isn't going to make you any money. If there IS such a buying frenzy, why the F@#! wouldn't you issue more shares from treasury and capture some more of that cash for the company's purposes? The Cringely plan means that the company better not need more than $2M in capital EVER, as it involves a single offering and then endless dilution. That cashflow better be rock solid, Bob.
We won't even get into the ludicrous fair-use interpretation. There's not a hope in hell any court would find that scheme legal. First off, it's transparently a copyright infringement scheme. You're making *multiple copies* of each of those million CDs, and FOR MONEY giving those copies to your shareholders. Ask bootleggers of M$ products how well incorporation of the company doing the copying helped them stay out of jail/the poorhouse.
Making everybody a shareholder is laughable. So what? Shareholders DO NOT own the assets of the company - they own the residual rights to the assets of the company. You cannot buy a share of M$, walk into Bill G's office, check out his stuff and then say you're exchanging your share certificate for his stapler. All your share entitles you to are dividends and to a pro rata share of the assets if/when the company is wound up BUT NOT BEFORE then.
The article was entertainingly stupid.
But *why* does it matter if Twain intended that connection, so long as others find it to be present? If you look at marxist and feminist critical theory in particular, the things that authors didn't know or didn't intend their stories to reveal may say more about the tale, the author and society than what they actually meant to imply.
A resupply mission is out of the question, because they could never prep another shuttle to actually try a rescue in time. So you get one trip up, and have to bring them all back. And you've got two weeks (at most) to come up with and implement the plan, using a ship that has the same design flaw as the one currently doomed in orbit. Not a good scenario. As I understand it, and its been a while since I did physics, Columbia had waaaaaay too little fuel to get to the ISS from the orbit it was in. Columbia couldn't have docked with it in any event. I'm not aware of any docking mechanism if they had got Atlantis up to meet it, so the only way to get the Columbia crew off the orbiter was for each and every one of them to space walk over to Atlantis, assuming Atlantis had the capability to carry that many people home.
So they might've launched Atlantis - what difference would it have made?
Actually, the court found that the overall resistance was so high that the only explanation was that it was the roundup resistant plants which had been deliberately planted and it was the non gm canola which had accidentally contaminated the crop. The Court found there was no way the GM crop could be explained as accidental contamination. Now, I suppose someone could have snuck onto the guys property at night, taken an unseeded field and planted it with GM canola just so they could then proceed to sue him, but that strikes me as a weeee bit unlikely.
Pleadings aren't made under oath, so nothing contained in them can be perjury. If you deliberately state facts you know to be false, however, you could run into civil liability for abuse of process.
Halperin shows the implications - business negotiations take minutes for multimillion dollar deals (just ask the guy on the box what his real squeal point is on the deal and whether that really is a deal breaker or not), the justice system is streamlined down to almost nothing (trials don't take very long, obviously), etc.
Blurb from the book website: http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/promo/truthmachi ne/
Man, I wouldn't trust a condo board with something like providing me internet connectivity for love nor money... I don't feel like putting network issues up for a popular vote or trusting the condo board to "get it" when it's time to allocate funds for equipment, maintenance, etc. Unless you're going to hire somebody to maintain it, or get yourself a contract, do you really want to be the free tech support guy for *160* users who know where you live.
absurd as a billion or trillion dollar verdict may be, the simple fact is that (IIRC) there are statutory damages for copyright infringement in the US that don't require proof of damage. From there on, it's just simple math - max damages x files copied = ~US GDP.
Even if they don't jail you, in civil trials you can draw negative inferences from failures to produce - basically, if somebody won't cough up a document, the court can just assume that it says the worst about the party which didn't cough it up. Which is probably true.
I don't know about the printscreen thing - Palladium + encrypted DRM-savvy DVI outputs and nobody's taking a screen capture of anything.
Sure, the SEC can send you to federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison and take your profits, but don't forget all the investors who lost money can launch a multimillion dollar class action against you, and since the SEC already took your profits, they're coming after the money you earned legitimately, or at least on scams nobody caught on to yet.
There is another group which suggests that making one's personal information a form of property is the single most privacy destructive legal development we could possibly create.
The entire purpose of creating property rights in something is to make it easier to alienate those rights for valuable consideration. Look at IP. What's a trade secret worth? Well, you can use it to make $$$. Can you sell it? Not really, and if you try you're taking horrible risks. Now, patent that sucker and copyright that code. Can you sell those? You betcha, you can license those to your hearts content.
Make our personal information proprietary and we'll all end up selling our personae to M$ or McDonalds and having to pay royalties to use our own names.
For example, the common law related to computer intrusions wasn't created, it was revealed as an adjunct of tort law topics like trespass to chattels and was simply undiscovered until we needed it.
Similarly, ruling on whether one can libel via BBS was merely a matter of revealing portions of the common law which hadn't been discovered yet before the advent of modern technology.
Hey, I'm not the one who made this philosophy up, don't look at me.
One of the most valuable (and most limited) resources in our society is court time and the rules are there to insure that when parties arrive at the bar they are ready so that we won't all end up back there again two weeks later on the same issue, or don't have to call off a hearing after an hour of argument when someone realizes they forgot to do something or one side is surprised due to lack of notice.
It's not so much one-upping as saying 'hey, hold on, I'm entitled to X and you've got to do X before we go in front of a judge according to Rule Y(Z). There's no point in showing up at court if I haven't got X because I can't possibly respond to your application/case/whatever without that important notice/document/evidence/etc. So, give it to me by the end of the day or call off the hearing - if you don't, you'll lose for failing to comply with the rules.'
And yes, it's unfortunate there's so much procedural law, but without it you just end up asking the court for directions all the time, which bogs the system down worse than having to take a bunch of procedural steps.
Little things like having both witnesses in the room at the same time when you sign it; making a bequest to a witness (granted, only invalidates the particular gift); holograph wills; I'm sure you know a lot more ways to screw up a will that aren't immediately obvious.