These are not "death spiral" convertibles. To have a death spiral you next to have a variable conversion ratio, so that as the stock price drops the convertibles convert into more and more shares.
The SCO convertibles have a fixed conversion ratio. It is true that buyers of such convertibles will short to stock to hedge their position, but a fixed convertible will only hedge a fixed sized short position. A variable convertible can hedge an exponentially increasing short position.
Google Zeitgeist has a chart of web browsers used to access Google. Unfortunately, they do not give actual numbers. The chart shows that MSIE 6.0 has the largest share. MSIE 5.5 and 5.0 are next and about equal. MSIE 6.0 is steadily gaining share from the other MSIE versions. All of the other browsers have near negligibly shares (maybe a few percent each).
Of course, people could have set their browsers to lie about their real identify.
I think the percentage is based on the number of insider shares sold to the insider shares owned. The total number of (insder and public) shares traded does not come into this.
Approximately, SCOX has 14M shares,
46% (6.4M) of which are insider shares. Insider sales totaled 136K. So the insider sales percentage is 136K/6.4M = 2.1%.
According to the link, net insider sales in the last six months of SCO have been 2.1%. The corresponding numbers for VA Software (LNUX - owner of Slashdot) was 24.4% and for Red Hat (RHAT)19.7%.
If insider sales at SCO are predicting something, what does it mean that the insider sales of LNUX and RHAT are an order of magnitude larger?
The subpoenas are issued by a Federal district court at the request of the RIAA. The RIAA, just like any other copyright holder, can submit a sworn statement alleging a copyright violation to the court clerk and have a subpoena issued.
The party being subpoenaed (here Charter Communications) has the right to challenge the subpoena in court.
The summary says that "South Korea is switching $300,000,000 worth of PCs to Open Source", but the story says that "if the change is successful, we will be able to save about US$300m a year."
The amount of savings is not the same as the worth of the PCs.
One problem is the number of races on one ballot. Here in Houston, Texas, in addition to voting for president, senator, and congressman, there are state, county and local offices, dozens of judges, sheriff, school boards (local and state), railroad commission, state constitutional amendments (22 voted on this year), bond proposals, and more. The actual of races on a ballot varies with the election and district, but can be many dozen on a single ballot.
I would think it difficult to hand count such ballots.
The RIAA basically just coordinates the lawsuits. According to the article, the actual plaintiffs were Sony Music, BMG, Virgin, Interscope, Atlantic, Warner Brothers, and Arista.
Since the Register article refers to "systems" and "infrastructure", I assume this change relates to servers, not desktops. Does anyone know what type of servers Ford was using?
The Scotsman talks about Ford "defecting" from Windows. Was Ford really using Windows for a lot of its servers? Or is this a loss for IBM, Sun, or some other "big iron" maker?
Criminal Infringement.
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either (1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or (2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
An AM radio does in fact contain a local oscillator that acts like a (weak) transmitter. An AM radio has an intermediate frequency generator at about 455 kHz.
Superheterodyne receiver
I think that the RIAA is targeting sharing, not downloading. A P2P program, like Kazaa, can automatically put downloaded songs into the share directory. So somebody can be sharing files and not realize it. That may have happened with the kid in this story.
The RIAA can find sharers by just using Kazaa, etc., as a client and searching for things to download. When they find a something they download it and note the IP address of the server. With the IP address and the time, they can get the users name from their ISP.
If the RIAA wants to prepare a possible court case, and not just fire-and forget some cease-and-desist letters, they would want to actually
download some songs and compare them to the real CD versions. They only need to download and check a handful for each user, not all that a user is sharing. It would not cost a lot to use some low paid assistants to check songs using a fast forward playback.
I do not think it is possible to hide the address of a server from a client when they are connected by TCP. Only the packet header information is needed, not the packet body.
Encrypting a link does not had its IP address.
If they wanted to go after downloaders, the obvious solution is to setup their own servers and see who downloads. There may be some legal issues doing this.
The $150,000 per song amount was determined by Congress.
Title 17, section 504(c)(2).
This is a maximum amount; the actual amount awarded is up to the court.
The law provides for statutory damages of up to $150K per work, not per copy. Statutory damages do not require showing the actual number of copies made. If a copyright owner can alternatively seek actual damages, based on the number and value of the copies made. So the penalty could be greater than $150K. I think it unlikely that P2P cases would be anything but demands for statutory damages.
The fact that the downloader's usage is non-commercial helps his case.
But by
statue
fair use is for
purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.
Downloading an MP3 of a song you bought is not for one of these purposes, so is not fair use.
The four tests relate to how far one can push these uses. Non-commercial use is given more latitude that commercial use, but even non-commercial use for criticism would probably not allow copying the entire work.
This is not correct. The subpoena process do not bypass the courts. Any copyright holder (the RIAA has no special rights here) can get a subpoena for a name and address based on an IP by filing a sworn declaration alleging infringement with the court. The party being subpoena can appeal to a judge to have the subpoena thrown out; this has already happened.
There is no "Fair Use" right to download and MP3 rip of a track, even if you have purchased a CD containing the track. This was decided in the my.mp3.com case.
...
although defendant seeks to portray its service as the "functional equivalent" of storing its subscribers' CDs, in actuality defendant is replaying for the subscribers converted versions of the recordings it copied, without authorization, from plaintiffs' copyrighted CDs. On its face, this makes out a presumptive case of infringement under the Copyright Act of 1976...
They download a song from your Kazaa server and note the time and your IP address. They then use a provision of the DMCA to ask a Federal court for a subpoena ordering your ISP to turn over your name to the RIAA. ISPs do keep logs of dynamic IP address assignments.
Many are upset at the ability to so easily get subpoenas, but that is the law.
They can pretty much ignore your Kazaa name.
A firewall would help only if you were trying to keep your Kazaa server inside your LAN and off the internet. But since Kazaa would be pretty worthless restricted to your LAN, you have to let it send packets to/from the internet.
Once the RIAA downloads a file owned by a member label, they should be able file a case and get it into discovery. In discovery, they can depose the account owner and ask about the use of P2P programs. Depositions are under oath.
You can take the Fifth, but in a civil case the judge/jury can draw an adverse implications from do so. In other words, while you can refuse to give a deposition, refusing is practically an admission of guilt.
You could deny everything, but if false, this would be perjury and could land you in prison.
If guilty, it is harder to "FUD" your way out of a civil case than a criminal case.
While the loser does not always have to pay the winner's legal fees, in the right circumstances they can be ordered to pay. In fact the same group that filed this suit, tried to sue DirectTV for extortion in state court.
They lost and were
ordered to pay DirectTV's legal costs of $97,222.10.
DirectTV was able to use
CA's anti-SLAPP statute to have the case
thrown out without a trial. Demand letters are protected communications, not extortion.
It is interesting how the roles are reversed here. Normally an anti-SLAPP law is used to protect an individual from a large corporation,
but here it is needed to protect DirectTV's rights.
According to the article, the
amnesty program will be revealed at about the same time the RIAA is expected to announce the filing of "several hundred" infringement suits.
I think it would be a good guess that these hundreds of suits are the result of the
anonymous subpeonas.
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1)to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
Buying a CD does not make you the owner of the copyright.
A server sharing files is making a copy, hence violating the copyright owner's exclusive right of distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
The SCO convertibles have a fixed conversion ratio. It is true that buyers of such convertibles will short to stock to hedge their position, but a fixed convertible will only hedge a fixed sized short position. A variable convertible can hedge an exponentially increasing short position.
Of course, people could have set their browsers to lie about their real identify.
Approximately, SCOX has 14M shares, 46% (6.4M) of which are insider shares. Insider sales totaled 136K. So the insider sales percentage is 136K/6.4M = 2.1%.
If insider sales at SCO are predicting something, what does it mean that the insider sales of LNUX and RHAT are an order of magnitude larger?
The party being subpoenaed (here Charter Communications) has the right to challenge the subpoena in court.
The amount of savings is not the same as the worth of the PCs.
I would think it difficult to hand count such ballots.
The RIAA basically just coordinates the lawsuits. According to the article, the actual plaintiffs were Sony Music, BMG, Virgin, Interscope, Atlantic, Warner Brothers, and Arista.
There is also no reason to think that the RIAA will lose most of the cases. In fact, Copyright law is unambiguously hostile to people who swap music files over the Internet. Even worse, according to Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual-property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: "The remedies are so terrifying that even if you have a good defense, you have to think twice."
The Scotsman talks about Ford "defecting" from Windows. Was Ford really using Windows for a lot of its servers? Or is this a loss for IBM, Sun, or some other "big iron" maker?
Title 18, section 2319, provides for a range of prison terms.
An AM radio does in fact contain a local oscillator that acts like a (weak) transmitter. An AM radio has an intermediate frequency generator at about 455 kHz. Superheterodyne receiver
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
The RIAA can find sharers by just using Kazaa, etc., as a client and searching for things to download. When they find a something they download it and note the IP address of the server. With the IP address and the time, they can get the users name from their ISP.
If the RIAA wants to prepare a possible court case, and not just fire-and forget some cease-and-desist letters, they would want to actually download some songs and compare them to the real CD versions. They only need to download and check a handful for each user, not all that a user is sharing. It would not cost a lot to use some low paid assistants to check songs using a fast forward playback.
I do not think it is possible to hide the address of a server from a client when they are connected by TCP. Only the packet header information is needed, not the packet body. Encrypting a link does not had its IP address.
If they wanted to go after downloaders, the obvious solution is to setup their own servers and see who downloads. There may be some legal issues doing this.
The $150,000 per song amount was determined by Congress. Title 17, section 504(c)(2). This is a maximum amount; the actual amount awarded is up to the court.
The law provides for statutory damages of up to $150K per work, not per copy. Statutory damages do not require showing the actual number of copies made. If a copyright owner can alternatively seek actual damages, based on the number and value of the copies made. So the penalty could be greater than $150K. I think it unlikely that P2P cases would be anything but demands for statutory damages.
They can ask for up to $150K per song in "statutory damages" without having to prove any numbers. The court could give them less.
But by statue fair use is for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research. Downloading an MP3 of a song you bought is not for one of these purposes, so is not fair use.
The four tests relate to how far one can push these uses. Non-commercial use is given more latitude that commercial use, but even non-commercial use for criticism would probably not allow copying the entire work.
This is not correct. The subpoena process do not bypass the courts. Any copyright holder (the RIAA has no special rights here) can get a subpoena for a name and address based on an IP by filing a sworn declaration alleging infringement with the court. The party being subpoena can appeal to a judge to have the subpoena thrown out; this has already happened.
From the decision:
They can pretty much ignore your Kazaa name.
A firewall would help only if you were trying to keep your Kazaa server inside your LAN and off the internet. But since Kazaa would be pretty worthless restricted to your LAN, you have to let it send packets to/from the internet.
It sounds like you are vulnerable.
You can take the Fifth, but in a civil case the judge/jury can draw an adverse implications from do so. In other words, while you can refuse to give a deposition, refusing is practically an admission of guilt.
You could deny everything, but if false, this would be perjury and could land you in prison.
If guilty, it is harder to "FUD" your way out of a civil case than a criminal case.
DirectTV was able to use CA's anti-SLAPP statute to have the case thrown out without a trial. Demand letters are protected communications, not extortion.
It is interesting how the roles are reversed here. Normally an anti-SLAPP law is used to protect an individual from a large corporation, but here it is needed to protect DirectTV's rights.
I think it would be a good guess that these hundreds of suits are the result of the anonymous subpeonas.
Buying a CD does not make you the owner of the copyright. A server sharing files is making a copy, hence violating the copyright owner's exclusive right of distribution.