You are WAY overgeneralizing. There is no US educational system, although the Federal government is getting increasingly controlling. Education is left to the states, and so there are over fifty educational systems. Some of these allow very wide differences between school districts, others try to even them out.
My son went through the Minneapolis public school system, and although it was hardly perfect (particularly the bully problem in K-5) it challenged him and taught him a lot, and he did just fine in college.
It's possible for a moral person to be in any class, although many ways of getting into the upper classes involve immoral activities. I'd consider myself upper middle (in the top decile of family income), and my wife and I got there by working and doing a good job.
Yes. Google is what enables people like you to think they can make a point without having any supporting evidence. If you've got nothing specific, you've got nothing. If you have something specific, you can suggest googling on, say, "Clinton X bribe", where X is the name of the person alleged to bribe.
If you're going to accuse other people of things, do your own damn research first so you know which orifice you are talking from.
Where I live, adultery is legally defined as a married woman having sex with someone not her husband (or maybe someone she's not married to, I don't remember the exact wording). If the law was actually used for anything, I think the legislature would change it, but as it isn't it can live on in the statute books for a long time.
Yet you're expecting them to act like charities, because you think they are artificially lowering prices below their maximum profit point. If they could pass increases on to the consumer by raising prices, they'd have raised them already for the extra profit. Increases to fixed prices do not normally affect the optimum price for greatest profit, but they do reduce profit.
However, "have to pass the increases along to our customers" turns out to be good PR when they raise rates.
Excuse me, but I didn't say the Russians did it. I said there is evidence that they did it, and no evidence the other way. What I've been trying to say is that the Wikileaks stuff isn't reliable, since we don't know the source, and if it comes from where the evidence points it's definitely unreliable.
It's very likely that the CIA has more information than we do, and Obama presumably can get reliable information out of them (I don't trust them). The fact that Obama is acting as if the hacks were Russian official acts is evidence that they are. It isn't conclusive, but it's the best evidence I've got. It's perfectly plausible that the Russians would try illegal means to mess with US elections. You can call that poetic justice or something, and I'd prefer it if we got our noses at least somewhat out of other people's politics, but what we have is a significant and believable possibility that these originate from Russian attackers who want to influence our election. Russians doing these sorts of things have the will and ability to fake things, at least on a small scale.
Therefore, people who just accept these as fully accurate are going well beyond what the evidence supports, and there's a good chance that they're being "useful idiots" for Putin (if I may use a Communist phrase here). I have no problem with people who at least doubt their authenticity.
Censorship, as far as I've always known, is preventing someone from saying something. Manipulation of the news by one party isn't censorship. The US media has serious problems (which can be blamed on the US public), but censorship isn't among them.
I've distributed my own copyrighted work myself. A few friends want to read my Nanowrimo novels. As far as editors, printing companies, et al., they're doing what they're doing with a license from the copyright holder. If I hire you to clean up "Heinrich von Sturm and the Russian Underground of Science" (which has gotten such praise as "readable") and publish it on Amazon, you're doing it under license and it's legal. If you get a copy and do that by yourself, it's illegal.
Okay, what is this supposed to mean? Global warming doesn't mean that all ice everywhere starts to melt at the same rate. It doesn't mean that every place on earth is warmer by the same amount. If you look at the data, you will see that the surface of the Earth, as a whole, is heating up. This is a simple basic fact, and cannot be disproved by making some superficial predictions and finding they're wrong. The Arctic sea ice is going away. We never used to have a usable Northwest Passage. That's a significant effect, and has nothing to do with Antarctic land ice - and you will notice that Zwally disagrees with others, so his findings aren't conclusive.
To be fair, you don't know what the police were doing when you called, and if they have the slightest hope of catching someone they're not going to drive up with lights and sirens.
If I go through the data, I'll find that temperatures are going up along with human-released CO2, and I'll find significant climate changes, like Arctic sea ice.
I have a similar solution. My coworkers are amused by their ability to come up to my cube and stand at the entrance, not quietly, and watch me ignore them.
Okay, if your manager comes over to watch you, what does he or she see?
When I'm working on a problem, I tend to sit at my desk and stare at the screen for a while. Every so often, I'll do a few things with the mouse, changing to look at other code or something like that. Then I'll occasionally burst into a typing flurry for a short time. It's much easier to tell if I'm working based on what I do.
I have a great job. I get to do interesting stuff along with highly competent people in a very positive corporate culture. I can see the effects of my work. I'm not leaving that because we have PTO and I don't like my cube. (Not until retirement, anyway.)
Where I am, we have paid time off. If I'm not feeling good, I have to ask myself if I'd be happier working anyway and taking that time off when I feel better. If I'm contagious, I have to ask myself if keeping other people healthy is worth not taking time off when I'll enjoy it.
The DMCA is the law that allows companies to host user-supplied content without facing horrifying legal liability, so that part is good in principle.
Your exclusive right to distribute your copyrighted work doesn't mean you have the right to use any possible means to distribute it. You have no right to key your haiku into the fender of my new car. You have no right to distribute your book by throwing it through my window. More to the point, you have no right to have someone else distribute it for you.
A DMCA takedown request doesn't prevent you from distributing your work. It informs somebody else that continuing to distribute your work is legally risky, and the somebody else has to decide whether to take your stuff down or face possible liability. The somebody else can accept your counterclaim and put it back up, or just decide it's not worth it since it wasn't like you were paying them (in the case of YouTube) so they have no legal duty towards you.
I'm not sure of copyright law here, but it's possible to identify either the uploader or downloader as the creator of the illegal copy and the other as involved in the infringement. Pass that one by a copyright lawyer before trying it in court.
As far as damages go, if there's statutory damages specified the wronged party doesn't have to establish actual damages. The MAFIAA doesn't have to establish that there was any harm suffered as long as the law says they don't have to. My idea of statutory damages is that they should be for cases where it's hard to determine the amount of damages, and should be proportional to the probable actual harm (perhaps a small multiple of a high estimate), but I'm neither a lawyer nor a legislator.
Sure. If I make something I have copyright to available for public torrenting, I can hardly complain if someone torrents it (although I'm sufficiently old to think of anonymous ftp servers instead). Similarly, if I post this on Slashdot, I don't have a complaint coming if someone downloads it and reads it. However, if I take something I have neither the copyright for nor an appropriate license and make it available for torrenting, we're into illegitimate copies, and the law pertaining to those is different.
I looked at your first reference. The author, Stephan Kinsella sets down a system of moral principles that I don't agree with, and says that strict adherence to them is more important than anything else. The fact that I don't agree with his system isn't all that important, but most people disagree, as most people aren't libertarians and Kinsella says quite a few libertarians wrongly sacrifice those principles for ways to get society to work better. At this point, it hardly matters if Kinsella's arguments are sound, since Kinsella's premises are unacceptable to most people.
However, Kinsella's arguments are not sound. By claiming that all rights are property rights, and that my rights as a person come from my ownership of my body, Kinsella makes it easy to institute slavery: since my body is just an asset I have, I can transfer ownership contractually; at the same time, he labels such things as taxes as slavery. Tax law doesn't say you have to do anything; it says that, if you do X, you must send Y to the government. A slave is required to do things by his or her owner.
Kinsella's rejection of utilitarianism is entirely superficial (and I've spent enough time on his writings that I'm not going to dig deeper; I'm going to judge him on what he writes here). I could just as easily say that his principles on property allow slavery, and are therefore wrong. Even if utilitarianism is not a good basis for ethics, that doesn't mean that a fundamental ideology should rule everything, even when the results aren't good for people.
Kinsella also claims that IP law doesn't encourage innovation, but almost all his references are for patents, not copyrights. The one that might support his position on copyrights is on something I can't access here because it's listed as a religious site. I believe that the case for copyright law is better than the case for patent law, given the different legal structure around each. (I'm not supporting current US copyright law or WIPO, preferring the old renewable 14-year copyright.)
A district court judge said the law meant one thing. The appeals court decided that it meant another, similar, thing. In the case of an ambiguous law, this is normal procedure. As long as laws are ambiguous and the US court system works like it does now, this is going to happen.
There are cases where Federal law isn't the same across the country, because circuit courts have ruled differently in different circuits, and the Supreme Court hasn't taken a case to establish a national precedent.
More precisely, I set up a server on the net that will send you a copy of something when it receives a request. I'm setting things up so that you can make a copy. If nobody tries to download it, no copies are made and I may well be in the clear legally. If you send the request, you are initiating the action that creates the copy.
I simply can't understand what you're trying to say in your first paragraph, but someone who makes a copy without a license (or other authority; for example, if you have a legitimate copy of software you can make all necessary copies necessary to run it) is infringing copyright, and it's normal to sue for statutory damages if it's a registered copyright, regardless of whether there was any actual loss.
IANAL, but I've heard that actions are never performed by machines. They're performed by humans. If I download something, I'm the one performing an action that causes a copy. Consider it something like the host having a copy machine sitting around with a copyrighted document in it. The person who pushes the button is the one who makes the copy.
Slashdot Mirror
You are WAY overgeneralizing. There is no US educational system, although the Federal government is getting increasingly controlling. Education is left to the states, and so there are over fifty educational systems. Some of these allow very wide differences between school districts, others try to even them out.
My son went through the Minneapolis public school system, and although it was hardly perfect (particularly the bully problem in K-5) it challenged him and taught him a lot, and he did just fine in college.
It's possible for a moral person to be in any class, although many ways of getting into the upper classes involve immoral activities. I'd consider myself upper middle (in the top decile of family income), and my wife and I got there by working and doing a good job.
Yes. Google is what enables people like you to think they can make a point without having any supporting evidence. If you've got nothing specific, you've got nothing. If you have something specific, you can suggest googling on, say, "Clinton X bribe", where X is the name of the person alleged to bribe.
If you're going to accuse other people of things, do your own damn research first so you know which orifice you are talking from.
Where I live, adultery is legally defined as a married woman having sex with someone not her husband (or maybe someone she's not married to, I don't remember the exact wording). If the law was actually used for anything, I think the legislature would change it, but as it isn't it can live on in the statute books for a long time.
Yet you're expecting them to act like charities, because you think they are artificially lowering prices below their maximum profit point. If they could pass increases on to the consumer by raising prices, they'd have raised them already for the extra profit. Increases to fixed prices do not normally affect the optimum price for greatest profit, but they do reduce profit.
However, "have to pass the increases along to our customers" turns out to be good PR when they raise rates.
Excuse me, but I didn't say the Russians did it. I said there is evidence that they did it, and no evidence the other way. What I've been trying to say is that the Wikileaks stuff isn't reliable, since we don't know the source, and if it comes from where the evidence points it's definitely unreliable.
It's very likely that the CIA has more information than we do, and Obama presumably can get reliable information out of them (I don't trust them). The fact that Obama is acting as if the hacks were Russian official acts is evidence that they are. It isn't conclusive, but it's the best evidence I've got. It's perfectly plausible that the Russians would try illegal means to mess with US elections. You can call that poetic justice or something, and I'd prefer it if we got our noses at least somewhat out of other people's politics, but what we have is a significant and believable possibility that these originate from Russian attackers who want to influence our election. Russians doing these sorts of things have the will and ability to fake things, at least on a small scale.
Therefore, people who just accept these as fully accurate are going well beyond what the evidence supports, and there's a good chance that they're being "useful idiots" for Putin (if I may use a Communist phrase here). I have no problem with people who at least doubt their authenticity.
Censorship, as far as I've always known, is preventing someone from saying something. Manipulation of the news by one party isn't censorship. The US media has serious problems (which can be blamed on the US public), but censorship isn't among them.
Where did that Canadian failure go? I remember offhand one that hit a large part of the East.
Certainly not a technical peer to the Lisa, but that's not what the guy at the store wanted me to think.
I've distributed my own copyrighted work myself. A few friends want to read my Nanowrimo novels. As far as editors, printing companies, et al., they're doing what they're doing with a license from the copyright holder. If I hire you to clean up "Heinrich von Sturm and the Russian Underground of Science" (which has gotten such praise as "readable") and publish it on Amazon, you're doing it under license and it's legal. If you get a copy and do that by yourself, it's illegal.
Okay, what is this supposed to mean? Global warming doesn't mean that all ice everywhere starts to melt at the same rate. It doesn't mean that every place on earth is warmer by the same amount. If you look at the data, you will see that the surface of the Earth, as a whole, is heating up. This is a simple basic fact, and cannot be disproved by making some superficial predictions and finding they're wrong. The Arctic sea ice is going away. We never used to have a usable Northwest Passage. That's a significant effect, and has nothing to do with Antarctic land ice - and you will notice that Zwally disagrees with others, so his findings aren't conclusive.
To be fair, you don't know what the police were doing when you called, and if they have the slightest hope of catching someone they're not going to drive up with lights and sirens.
If I go through the data, I'll find that temperatures are going up along with human-released CO2, and I'll find significant climate changes, like Arctic sea ice.
I have a similar solution. My coworkers are amused by their ability to come up to my cube and stand at the entrance, not quietly, and watch me ignore them.
Okay, if your manager comes over to watch you, what does he or she see?
When I'm working on a problem, I tend to sit at my desk and stare at the screen for a while. Every so often, I'll do a few things with the mouse, changing to look at other code or something like that. Then I'll occasionally burst into a typing flurry for a short time. It's much easier to tell if I'm working based on what I do.
I have a great job. I get to do interesting stuff along with highly competent people in a very positive corporate culture. I can see the effects of my work. I'm not leaving that because we have PTO and I don't like my cube. (Not until retirement, anyway.)
Where I am, we have paid time off. If I'm not feeling good, I have to ask myself if I'd be happier working anyway and taking that time off when I feel better. If I'm contagious, I have to ask myself if keeping other people healthy is worth not taking time off when I'll enjoy it.
The DMCA is the law that allows companies to host user-supplied content without facing horrifying legal liability, so that part is good in principle.
Your exclusive right to distribute your copyrighted work doesn't mean you have the right to use any possible means to distribute it. You have no right to key your haiku into the fender of my new car. You have no right to distribute your book by throwing it through my window. More to the point, you have no right to have someone else distribute it for you.
A DMCA takedown request doesn't prevent you from distributing your work. It informs somebody else that continuing to distribute your work is legally risky, and the somebody else has to decide whether to take your stuff down or face possible liability. The somebody else can accept your counterclaim and put it back up, or just decide it's not worth it since it wasn't like you were paying them (in the case of YouTube) so they have no legal duty towards you.
I'm not sure of copyright law here, but it's possible to identify either the uploader or downloader as the creator of the illegal copy and the other as involved in the infringement. Pass that one by a copyright lawyer before trying it in court.
As far as damages go, if there's statutory damages specified the wronged party doesn't have to establish actual damages. The MAFIAA doesn't have to establish that there was any harm suffered as long as the law says they don't have to. My idea of statutory damages is that they should be for cases where it's hard to determine the amount of damages, and should be proportional to the probable actual harm (perhaps a small multiple of a high estimate), but I'm neither a lawyer nor a legislator.
Sure. If I make something I have copyright to available for public torrenting, I can hardly complain if someone torrents it (although I'm sufficiently old to think of anonymous ftp servers instead). Similarly, if I post this on Slashdot, I don't have a complaint coming if someone downloads it and reads it. However, if I take something I have neither the copyright for nor an appropriate license and make it available for torrenting, we're into illegitimate copies, and the law pertaining to those is different.
I looked at your first reference. The author, Stephan Kinsella sets down a system of moral principles that I don't agree with, and says that strict adherence to them is more important than anything else. The fact that I don't agree with his system isn't all that important, but most people disagree, as most people aren't libertarians and Kinsella says quite a few libertarians wrongly sacrifice those principles for ways to get society to work better. At this point, it hardly matters if Kinsella's arguments are sound, since Kinsella's premises are unacceptable to most people.
However, Kinsella's arguments are not sound. By claiming that all rights are property rights, and that my rights as a person come from my ownership of my body, Kinsella makes it easy to institute slavery: since my body is just an asset I have, I can transfer ownership contractually; at the same time, he labels such things as taxes as slavery. Tax law doesn't say you have to do anything; it says that, if you do X, you must send Y to the government. A slave is required to do things by his or her owner.
Kinsella's rejection of utilitarianism is entirely superficial (and I've spent enough time on his writings that I'm not going to dig deeper; I'm going to judge him on what he writes here). I could just as easily say that his principles on property allow slavery, and are therefore wrong. Even if utilitarianism is not a good basis for ethics, that doesn't mean that a fundamental ideology should rule everything, even when the results aren't good for people.
Kinsella also claims that IP law doesn't encourage innovation, but almost all his references are for patents, not copyrights. The one that might support his position on copyrights is on something I can't access here because it's listed as a religious site. I believe that the case for copyright law is better than the case for patent law, given the different legal structure around each. (I'm not supporting current US copyright law or WIPO, preferring the old renewable 14-year copyright.)
A district court judge said the law meant one thing. The appeals court decided that it meant another, similar, thing. In the case of an ambiguous law, this is normal procedure. As long as laws are ambiguous and the US court system works like it does now, this is going to happen.
There are cases where Federal law isn't the same across the country, because circuit courts have ruled differently in different circuits, and the Supreme Court hasn't taken a case to establish a national precedent.
More precisely, I set up a server on the net that will send you a copy of something when it receives a request. I'm setting things up so that you can make a copy. If nobody tries to download it, no copies are made and I may well be in the clear legally. If you send the request, you are initiating the action that creates the copy.
I simply can't understand what you're trying to say in your first paragraph, but someone who makes a copy without a license (or other authority; for example, if you have a legitimate copy of software you can make all necessary copies necessary to run it) is infringing copyright, and it's normal to sue for statutory damages if it's a registered copyright, regardless of whether there was any actual loss.
IANAL, but I've heard that actions are never performed by machines. They're performed by humans. If I download something, I'm the one performing an action that causes a copy. Consider it something like the host having a copy machine sitting around with a copyrighted document in it. The person who pushes the button is the one who makes the copy.