Thanks for the bullish personal attack regarding my ethics as well as the unnecessarily cruel directive to kill myself for the good of society. I suspect you would be content to live in the age of Braveheart.
As it appears we were raised with different societal norms on the issue, I do at least note a difference between the U.S. and Canada when it comes to the scope of publicity rights such that this girl may not have a case were she in your jurisdiction.
Yep, and it would be swell that Linux was simple enough that I could get everything I want working on it... but it isn't, and I mindfully spend hours reading forums before I execute a command that starts with sudo.;)
Believe it or not, I feel your pain. If the law were easy enough to understand, I wouldn't need a professional to mediate it for me. I may know business, IP, contract, and even some family law... but if I have a real Personal Injury, Social Security, Workers Comp or a host of other areas of law, I have to hire a friggin lawyer!
We may be able to justify blaming lawyers for a portion of the complexity of the law, but most of the U.S. legislature who enacts laws (laws, by the way, open to myriads of interpretations and/or blantantly violative of our Constitution) are not lawyers.
If you were my buddy and told me you had the skills to make a repair on my house, and then you made a mistake that no person with ordinary skill would make, I would hope that you would have the decency to pony up and pay for your mistake. If you shrugged your shoulders and told me to "fuck off", we wouldn't be friends anymore.
I don't know of any rule of polite society that calls for burning down my house as a result of me asking you to take responsibility for your mistake... but I don't know where you live.:)
Because I probably wouldn't have an issue with a counselor/photographer at my kid's camp (or excursion or whatever it was) posting photos of the event that included my daughter. I would have a problem with a company making a buck off of my child's photo, especially in light of the ridicule this child has apparently been subject to.
Because a British company doing business in Australia pulled a picture of a webpage in the U.S. without permission from the photographer and without obtaining a release from the subject. They have subjected themselves to Texas jurisdiction... though do you raise an interesting conflict of law issue.
While you may have a point technically, you must concede that trains of thought like that are why so many people (especially around here) dislike lawyers.
I have noted the general trend of lawyer bashing around Slashdot... Obviously, I'm here so I can live with it.:)
There are many people in the world who want to provide things to the world for free, as a public/community benefit. Open source is often an example. Creative Commons is apparently another. They try to provide a quick "avoid most copyright trouble" license for people, and do it at not cost. If I use them, I am not paying them any money and thus have no right to expect anything. Any other attitude may or may not be legally valid but is highly anti-social and will earn the wrath of those freely trying to better the world.
In you plumber example, my question would be was this a professional to whom I had paid money or my buddy helping me out? In the later case I have no right to complain, in my opinion. I am not paying money for a service, and without the exchange there is no assumption of responsibility on his part. I am trying to get something for nothing, commercially speaking - I may get lucky or I may not but that's the chance I take and I prefer to take that chance.
Well, not to sound like a lawyer, but it depends. If you know your buddy can't change a lightbulb and you ask him to fix the leak in your house, I'd say "caveat emptor". However, if your buddy is a certified master plumber and he skips the sealant when installing a pipe, I'd tell him to call his insurance carrier. You relied on his skill and knowledge regardless of whether you paid him or it was a favor. This is the part of "free, as in beer" which I think gets lost in the warranty disclaimers and RTFM attitude on Slashdot and in the open-source community. You are responsible for your actions whether your motive is money, as a "favor" to a buddy, or due to your underlying sense of public good. There are some thing you can "disclaim" and nobody thinks twice. There are some things you can't. In this case, I think there is a legitimate (i.e., gets you into court argument) to be made that CC is providing a service, not a product. It is that distinction for which the public hates lawyers for exploiting, but what any individual in the public wants his or her lawyer to do, at least in the U.S. adversarial system.
If you see CC as providing unauthorized practice of law, I ask you this - how does one with no outlay of $$ find a way to release content for free without having to worry about the legal fine points? If you claim there is no way you are undercutting the core philosophy of open source - if this isn't possible in the current legal framework the framework needs to be fixed, period. What if I ask a friend what license to use to accomplish purpose X - if he responds is he providing unauthorized practice of law? Where does it end? I actually felt that the open source "market" handles this (reasonably) well. Projects that have intrinsic merit to people in the community get funded and can pay legal counsel. Sometimes, even a project who cannot afford legal counsel, can get a lawyer to do pro bono work. I would much rather do pro bono consulting with an open source project than the typical workers comp or custody pro bono I do to meet my "responsibilities" every year (which is not a mandated responsibility, but an internal one). But note: Creative Commons has lawyers. One of its Board Members is a lawyer who I believe has done a lot to protect the little guy in the digital age. In the end, I just think somebody misjudged the design of the website and opened them up to liability. Was it reasonably foreseeable that CC should be on the hook in this case? Who knows!?! But, if I am representing this family, CC would be a Defendant in light of all of my posts on this topic. I think I am ethically obligated to pursue that claim.
That is utter nonsense. The damage was already done when Virgin's dumb-ass marketing exec plastered this guy's daughter all over the airwaves without asking. And apparently, despite it being "on the other side of the world", enough of the kid's classmates saw it to ridicule her.
Yes that is what I am saying. There is a problem with the Staples analogy though. Staples doesn't draft the forms it sells. It is also not providing any service other than retail services in getting the forms to the intended audience. The company that drafts the forms only provides it to the purchaser. It never has an inquiry with the purchaser as to what the form is for and what the purchaser's needs are. In that sense, it is selling a product versus providing a service.
On the other hand, CC does provide an inquiry prior to drafting a form, even though it is a rudimentary and simplistic system. I think that is the legal distinction that gets them listed in the suit's caption as a Defendant.
In the end, however, CC may be out of this case early on, either in a Motion to Dismiss or Summary Judgment. But the apparent (and note I did say, apparent) lack of care in how the CC website drafts licenses and the lack of oversight by a lawyer, in my opinion, is a real problem for Creative Commons. That is something I suspect they may rectify depending on the outcome of this case.
Both of you have made the assumption that all lawyers are working at a medium to large size firm (where you do get paid $115K per year starting salary). Average salary means half are below and half are above. Regardless, the average salary for a 1st year associate in my small-town of York is probably $45K.
For those of us who are self-employed, we are often below average. Though I may gross $115K or more per year, I also lose half of it to expenses and taxes. Of course, despite being "below average" salary-wise, self-employment has its advantages... I don't have to listen to some idiot partner who got his partnership because he can bring clients in, but wouldn't know the difference between hearsay and heresy.:)
My example is that I am engaging in malpractice if I draft a license without even looking at the work in question. Malpractice is a term people associate with doctors and lawyers, but it is just another word for negligence. CC is not exempt from the requirement to use due care in the provision of a service (drafting licenses), regardless of whether it is done for profit or not. It is the same question you ask yourself with a basement full of water after the plumber makes a repair - Did he use reasonable care in fixing the pipes in my house?
The Creative Commons website is not someone randomly pulling a "form contract" and using it as you state. Creative Commons website asks the user questions about what he or she wants in a license as surely as I would were that person sitting in my office. Then, Creative Commons generates a license to fit the person's apparent need. I am not saying it is a slam-dunk case... I am just saying it is a compelling argument as to their liability in this case.
In light of the disclaimer you posted from CC's website, your post also brings up the issue of whether CC is engaging in unauthorized practice of law. Yeah, yeah, they say they are not a "law firm" but they are (arguably) providing legal services with the way they website is designed. Whether they are liable or not in the "Virgin" case, they can be held accountable for the provision of legal services without a lawyer ever looking at the finished product.
The reason why we lawyers get "rich" (I wish!) is because people make the assumption that they know what the laws is and what the consequences are.
This was a resolvable problem with a 5 minute phone call from Virgin Marketing to Virgin Legal, except that some dumb ass thought he "knew the law". Any third-year law student could tell you that you can't just pull a photo off somebody's personal, non-commercial web page without finding out who was in the photo and getting a name and likeness release. That has nothing to do with the copyright on the photo itself... it could have been released into the public domain and you would still need that release from the subject in the photo.
Part of the argument for suing CC at least with respect to the license it "wrote" for the photographer is that CC fails to warn its "client" that the license doesn't consider privacy issues for the subjects in the photo. Of course, I could also say that using a website to draft you a license instead of paying me is why you got here in the first place. Nobody at CC even looks at the photo before it writes the license. For me, that's malpractice, pure and simple... the argument that CC should be held to that standard of care is compelling.
The "any license but free" crowd on Slashdot has missed the point again. Half the posters on this story think this is a copyright issues... it is NOT. It is a duty of care and privacy issue. Clearly, half the people also read the Slashdot story, but not the linked story. I am not a father, but if some company plastered my 16 y.o. daughter's picture all over TV, billboards, newspapers and the internet with a caption "Free Text Virgin to Virgin," there would be no end to my wrath.
If you believe what TimeWarner did was not theft of services then you must think you are not speeding when do 66 in a 65 mile per hour zone.
If you highjack DNS for your own benefit, it is theft of services. The law isn't so narrow that it only applies to the dope next door hacking into your cable line. The law wouldn't accept you trespassing on his property and busting up his cablebox any more than it would accept TimeWarner interrupting and "borrowing" DNS services to shut down bots.
Big companies like Time Warner are not exempt from the Crimes Code. Now, the fact that nobody is going to bother prosecuting them doesn't excuse what they did, it just means the the DA has more important crimes to deal with than Time Warner pilfering DNS bandwith to screw with the script-kiddies.
BTW, I agree that it is a disgrace that Pa. doesn't have its code on-line (other than an AOL homepage). I could have linked to the Lexis page, but I wouldn't want Lexis pressing theft of services charges against thousands of Slashdot users.;)
The criminal code calls it "Theft of Services"
on
TimeWarner DNS Hijacking
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This seems like sour grapes for what I have found to be a great product so far. The iPod batteries going all the way back to the first generation are not truly a user replaceable item. You have to spend forty bucks to get OWC to do it. Why such shock and outrage about the iPhone battery!?!
If you looked at the pictures and watched the video Apple released prior to the 29th, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the iPhone is not meant to be pulled apart.
Instead of waiting in line like a tool for four days, people complaining about battery life could have waited two days after release (like I did), futzed around with one before you bought it, and EASILY figured out the battery is not a user replaceable item.
Let's get real... the iPhone is a do-everything device in a form factor nobody expected to be as small as it is. You have to give up something somewhere... in this case, it is the battery... suck it up.
It would have been no different with any other cell carrier, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, or whoever. What choice did Apple have but pick the best of the worst? (Whether AT&T truly is the best of the worst remains to be seen, but they apparently gave Apple the deal they wanted).
Everybody makes the incorrect assumption that you are going to get the same user experience with a cell phone carrier as you do with Apple. At least with Apple, one company gives a hoot in the arrangement. You get the same customer service from Microsoft when you buy a Windows Mobile phone as you do with your carrier.
I will be leaving Verizon for AT&T when I get an iPhone, so I hope the service is comparable. I am not however expecting the customer service to be any better.
Civil law after the fact can't bring victims back to life, so it doesn't really address the problem at all.
Neither can criminal law. When it comes to people's irresponsible behavior behind the wheel, criminalizing behavior does not make the behavior stop. DUI laws are a classic example. Despite tough DUI laws in most states, people continue to drink and drive.
I personally am not prepared to criminalize behavior that is already addressed by Tort Law, and, in fact by Criminal Law, for egregious cases, with vehicle manslaughter.
I communte 80 miles roundtrip to my office. I don't like when people are wondering all over the road and then I realize they are talking on their cell phone. But heck, what makes that behavior rise to the level of criminality? Doesn't civil law amply address the issue of irresponsible people who cause accidents when talking on their cell phone (or eating a bag of Doritos, putting on make-up, reading the paper, futzing with the Nav system... whatever...)?
How long did it take the first version of Firefox to get to 1 million downloads as compared to Safari?
That may say something about how the general public feels about open source offerings v. closed source offerings outside of Microsoft. Note: I am not making any comparisons about the quality of Firefox v. Safari (I use both, I like both), so don't blast me off Slashdot...
I am just wondering what it says, if anything, about the general public's perspective.
All of this will take YEARS and cost them many hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees which I'm sure they'll quickly realize they can't recover from you, and, as such, they won't bother.
Because these obstacles have, of course, stopped them from suing 12 year olds and grandmothers for alleged file sharing...
The ad is not a parody and to suggest that it is simply because it is posted on Slashdot (where everything is "fair use", "prior art" and "parody"!) is nonsense. For a parody defense to work, she needs to be making some kind of commentary about the original product. She is actually advertising her product for use with an iPod! Read a case like Acuff-Rose for parody in copyright. If she is taking Apple's "sillhouette ads" and copying them to advertise her "device", it is copyright infringement, pure and simple. Heck, she could be advertising tires and it would be copyright infringment.
This opens them up to a lot of liability. They get a site wrong and it loses business, they will have defamation claims, interference in business claims... their legal team will be plenty busy.
Perhaps now that Google knows he posted excerpts before he signed, they'll make all future prospective employees sign an NDA not to disclose Google's NDA before showing it to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the bullish personal attack regarding my ethics as well as the unnecessarily cruel directive to kill myself for the good of society. I suspect you would be content to live in the age of Braveheart.
When it comes to who has a poor grasp on the law, though, you have missed the point if you continue to believe this is about copyright law instead of unauthorized use of the girl's name and likeness.
As it appears we were raised with different societal norms on the issue, I do at least note a difference between the U.S. and Canada when it comes to the scope of publicity rights such that this girl may not have a case were she in your jurisdiction.
Yep, and it would be swell that Linux was simple enough that I could get everything I want working on it... but it isn't, and I mindfully spend hours reading forums before I execute a command that starts with sudo. ;)
Believe it or not, I feel your pain. If the law were easy enough to understand, I wouldn't need a professional to mediate it for me. I may know business, IP, contract, and even some family law... but if I have a real Personal Injury, Social Security, Workers Comp or a host of other areas of law, I have to hire a friggin lawyer!
We may be able to justify blaming lawyers for a portion of the complexity of the law, but most of the U.S. legislature who enacts laws (laws, by the way, open to myriads of interpretations and/or blantantly violative of our Constitution) are not lawyers.
That says something.. I'm just not sure what. ;)
If you were my buddy and told me you had the skills to make a repair on my house, and then you made a mistake that no person with ordinary skill would make, I would hope that you would have the decency to pony up and pay for your mistake. If you shrugged your shoulders and told me to "fuck off", we wouldn't be friends anymore. I don't know of any rule of polite society that calls for burning down my house as a result of me asking you to take responsibility for your mistake... but I don't know where you live. :)
Because I probably wouldn't have an issue with a counselor/photographer at my kid's camp (or excursion or whatever it was) posting photos of the event that included my daughter. I would have a problem with a company making a buck off of my child's photo, especially in light of the ridicule this child has apparently been subject to.
Because a British company doing business in Australia pulled a picture of a webpage in the U.S. without permission from the photographer and without obtaining a release from the subject. They have subjected themselves to Texas jurisdiction... though do you raise an interesting conflict of law issue.
Nah, average means adding them all up and dividing by the number. You're thinking of median.
Hehe... you are correct. I went to law school because I heard there would be no math. :)
I have noted the general trend of lawyer bashing around Slashdot... Obviously, I'm here so I can live with it.
In you plumber example, my question would be was this a professional to whom I had paid money or my buddy helping me out? In the later case I have no right to complain, in my opinion. I am not paying money for a service, and without the exchange there is no assumption of responsibility on his part. I am trying to get something for nothing, commercially speaking - I may get lucky or I may not but that's the chance I take and I prefer to take that chance.
Well, not to sound like a lawyer, but it depends. If you know your buddy can't change a lightbulb and you ask him to fix the leak in your house, I'd say "caveat emptor". However, if your buddy is a certified master plumber and he skips the sealant when installing a pipe, I'd tell him to call his insurance carrier. You relied on his skill and knowledge regardless of whether you paid him or it was a favor. This is the part of "free, as in beer" which I think gets lost in the warranty disclaimers and RTFM attitude on Slashdot and in the open-source community. You are responsible for your actions whether your motive is money, as a "favor" to a buddy, or due to your underlying sense of public good. There are some thing you can "disclaim" and nobody thinks twice. There are some things you can't. In this case, I think there is a legitimate (i.e., gets you into court argument) to be made that CC is providing a service, not a product. It is that distinction for which the public hates lawyers for exploiting, but what any individual in the public wants his or her lawyer to do, at least in the U.S. adversarial system. If you see CC as providing unauthorized practice of law, I ask you this - how does one with no outlay of $$ find a way to release content for free without having to worry about the legal fine points? If you claim there is no way you are undercutting the core philosophy of open source - if this isn't possible in the current legal framework the framework needs to be fixed, period. What if I ask a friend what license to use to accomplish purpose X - if he responds is he providing unauthorized practice of law? Where does it end? I actually felt that the open source "market" handles this (reasonably) well. Projects that have intrinsic merit to people in the community get funded and can pay legal counsel. Sometimes, even a project who cannot afford legal counsel, can get a lawyer to do pro bono work. I would much rather do pro bono consulting with an open source project than the typical workers comp or custody pro bono I do to meet my "responsibilities" every year (which is not a mandated responsibility, but an internal one). But note: Creative Commons has lawyers. One of its Board Members is a lawyer who I believe has done a lot to protect the little guy in the digital age. In the end, I just think somebody misjudged the design of the website and opened them up to liability. Was it reasonably foreseeable that CC should be on the hook in this case? Who knows!?! But, if I am representing this family, CC would be a Defendant in light of all of my posts on this topic. I think I am ethically obligated to pursue that claim.
That is utter nonsense. The damage was already done when Virgin's dumb-ass marketing exec plastered this guy's daughter all over the airwaves without asking. And apparently, despite it being "on the other side of the world", enough of the kid's classmates saw it to ridicule her.
Yes that is what I am saying. There is a problem with the Staples analogy though. Staples doesn't draft the forms it sells. It is also not providing any service other than retail services in getting the forms to the intended audience. The company that drafts the forms only provides it to the purchaser. It never has an inquiry with the purchaser as to what the form is for and what the purchaser's needs are. In that sense, it is selling a product versus providing a service.
On the other hand, CC does provide an inquiry prior to drafting a form, even though it is a rudimentary and simplistic system. I think that is the legal distinction that gets them listed in the suit's caption as a Defendant.
In the end, however, CC may be out of this case early on, either in a Motion to Dismiss or Summary Judgment. But the apparent (and note I did say, apparent) lack of care in how the CC website drafts licenses and the lack of oversight by a lawyer, in my opinion, is a real problem for Creative Commons. That is something I suspect they may rectify depending on the outcome of this case.
Both of you have made the assumption that all lawyers are working at a medium to large size firm (where you do get paid $115K per year starting salary). Average salary means half are below and half are above. Regardless, the average salary for a 1st year associate in my small-town of York is probably $45K.
For those of us who are self-employed, we are often below average. Though I may gross $115K or more per year, I also lose half of it to expenses and taxes. Of course, despite being "below average" salary-wise, self-employment has its advantages... I don't have to listen to some idiot partner who got his partnership because he can bring clients in, but wouldn't know the difference between hearsay and heresy. :)
My example is that I am engaging in malpractice if I draft a license without even looking at the work in question. Malpractice is a term people associate with doctors and lawyers, but it is just another word for negligence. CC is not exempt from the requirement to use due care in the provision of a service (drafting licenses), regardless of whether it is done for profit or not. It is the same question you ask yourself with a basement full of water after the plumber makes a repair - Did he use reasonable care in fixing the pipes in my house?
The Creative Commons website is not someone randomly pulling a "form contract" and using it as you state. Creative Commons website asks the user questions about what he or she wants in a license as surely as I would were that person sitting in my office. Then, Creative Commons generates a license to fit the person's apparent need. I am not saying it is a slam-dunk case... I am just saying it is a compelling argument as to their liability in this case.
In light of the disclaimer you posted from CC's website, your post also brings up the issue of whether CC is engaging in unauthorized practice of law. Yeah, yeah, they say they are not a "law firm" but they are (arguably) providing legal services with the way they website is designed. Whether they are liable or not in the "Virgin" case, they can be held accountable for the provision of legal services without a lawyer ever looking at the finished product.
The reason why we lawyers get "rich" (I wish!) is because people make the assumption that they know what the laws is and what the consequences are.
This was a resolvable problem with a 5 minute phone call from Virgin Marketing to Virgin Legal, except that some dumb ass thought he "knew the law". Any third-year law student could tell you that you can't just pull a photo off somebody's personal, non-commercial web page without finding out who was in the photo and getting a name and likeness release. That has nothing to do with the copyright on the photo itself... it could have been released into the public domain and you would still need that release from the subject in the photo.
Part of the argument for suing CC at least with respect to the license it "wrote" for the photographer is that CC fails to warn its "client" that the license doesn't consider privacy issues for the subjects in the photo. Of course, I could also say that using a website to draft you a license instead of paying me is why you got here in the first place. Nobody at CC even looks at the photo before it writes the license. For me, that's malpractice, pure and simple... the argument that CC should be held to that standard of care is compelling.
The "any license but free" crowd on Slashdot has missed the point again. Half the posters on this story think this is a copyright issues... it is NOT. It is a duty of care and privacy issue. Clearly, half the people also read the Slashdot story, but not the linked story. I am not a father, but if some company plastered my 16 y.o. daughter's picture all over TV, billboards, newspapers and the internet with a caption "Free Text Virgin to Virgin," there would be no end to my wrath.
If you believe what TimeWarner did was not theft of services then you must think you are not speeding when do 66 in a 65 mile per hour zone.
;)
If you highjack DNS for your own benefit, it is theft of services. The law isn't so narrow that it only applies to the dope next door hacking into your cable line. The law wouldn't accept you trespassing on his property and busting up his cablebox any more than it would accept TimeWarner interrupting and "borrowing" DNS services to shut down bots.
Big companies like Time Warner are not exempt from the Crimes Code. Now, the fact that nobody is going to bother prosecuting them doesn't excuse what they did, it just means the the DA has more important crimes to deal with than Time Warner pilfering DNS bandwith to screw with the script-kiddies.
BTW, I agree that it is a disgrace that Pa. doesn't have its code on-line (other than an AOL homepage). I could have linked to the Lexis page, but I wouldn't want Lexis pressing theft of services charges against thousands of Slashdot users.
In Pennsylvania, it sounds like it might fall under Theft of, or Diversion of Services.
This seems like sour grapes for what I have found to be a great product so far. The iPod batteries going all the way back to the first generation are not truly a user replaceable item. You have to spend forty bucks to get OWC to do it. Why such shock and outrage about the iPhone battery!?!
If you looked at the pictures and watched the video Apple released prior to the 29th, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the iPhone is not meant to be pulled apart.
Instead of waiting in line like a tool for four days, people complaining about battery life could have waited two days after release (like I did), futzed around with one before you bought it, and EASILY figured out the battery is not a user replaceable item.
Let's get real... the iPhone is a do-everything device in a form factor nobody expected to be as small as it is. You have to give up something somewhere... in this case, it is the battery... suck it up.
It would have been no different with any other cell carrier, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, or whoever. What choice did Apple have but pick the best of the worst? (Whether AT&T truly is the best of the worst remains to be seen, but they apparently gave Apple the deal they wanted).
Everybody makes the incorrect assumption that you are going to get the same user experience with a cell phone carrier as you do with Apple. At least with Apple, one company gives a hoot in the arrangement. You get the same customer service from Microsoft when you buy a Windows Mobile phone as you do with your carrier.
I will be leaving Verizon for AT&T when I get an iPhone, so I hope the service is comparable. I am not however expecting the customer service to be any better.
Neither can criminal law. When it comes to people's irresponsible behavior behind the wheel, criminalizing behavior does not make the behavior stop. DUI laws are a classic example. Despite tough DUI laws in most states, people continue to drink and drive.
I personally am not prepared to criminalize behavior that is already addressed by Tort Law, and, in fact by Criminal Law, for egregious cases, with vehicle manslaughter.
I communte 80 miles roundtrip to my office. I don't like when people are wondering all over the road and then I realize they are talking on their cell phone. But heck, what makes that behavior rise to the level of criminality? Doesn't civil law amply address the issue of irresponsible people who cause accidents when talking on their cell phone (or eating a bag of Doritos, putting on make-up, reading the paper, futzing with the Nav system... whatever...)?
How long did it take the first version of Firefox to get to 1 million downloads as compared to Safari?
That may say something about how the general public feels about open source offerings v. closed source offerings outside of Microsoft. Note: I am not making any comparisons about the quality of Firefox v. Safari (I use both, I like both), so don't blast me off Slashdot...
I am just wondering what it says, if anything, about the general public's perspective.
Because these obstacles have, of course, stopped them from suing 12 year olds and grandmothers for alleged file sharing...
The ad is not a parody and to suggest that it is simply because it is posted on Slashdot (where everything is "fair use", "prior art" and "parody"!) is nonsense. For a parody defense to work, she needs to be making some kind of commentary about the original product. She is actually advertising her product for use with an iPod! Read a case like Acuff-Rose for parody in copyright. If she is taking Apple's "sillhouette ads" and copying them to advertise her "device", it is copyright infringement, pure and simple. Heck, she could be advertising tires and it would be copyright infringment.
This opens them up to a lot of liability. They get a site wrong and it loses business, they will have defamation claims, interference in business claims... their legal team will be plenty busy.
Perhaps now that Google knows he posted excerpts before he signed, they'll make all future prospective employees sign an NDA not to disclose Google's NDA before showing it to them.
Are you really going to take advice on your IP from a Slashdot post?
Perhaps I'll go ask my barber how to configure SSL on Apache? I'm sure he'll have some good advice.