A statute of limitations? Something's either admissable or it isn't.
Yes, it is admissible before the statute of limitations expires, and inadmissible after the statute of limitations expires.
The judge is not talking about criminal law, but civil law. In criminal law, evidence does not "expire", but as you cannot be prosecuted for certain crimes after a given period of time has passed since the alleged offense, the evidence is moot. The idea is that you shouldn't throw a forty-year-old man in jail for a red light he ran when he was eighteen. I should point out that in most jurisdictions there is no statute of limitations on murder and other infamous crimes.
What the judge is trying to do is limit the viability of e-mail in civil litigation. Hypothetical situation: four years ago one of your coworkers made a huge, obsessive, gigantic stink about something, and you end up wasting an entire week chasing shadows as a result. When you tell her she was wrong and wasted your time, she fires off an angry e-mail to your boss. Your boss forwards it to you with a note attached, "What's this about?" You reply, "Remember how I showed you that Foobley component wouldn't work in the Warbley project? She's still bitching about it." He writes back one line: "I figured as much."
After four more years of similar raving nonsense on every single project she's on, nobody takes her seriously about anything anymore. Feeling like there must be some other reason she's been ostracized, she quits the company and sues for sexual harassment. All e-mail records from every employee she has ever worked with get subpoenaed. Your e-mail from four years ago is dredged up. And in it, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this bigoted, sexist monster used the vile, derogatory term "bitch" to refer to my client, a person of gender! This degenerate, immature pig used vicious, defamatory language in the workplace, thereby creating a hostile work environment for my poor victimized client. And instead of taking immediate corrective action, this penis-monster's boss, another penis-monster, conspired to agree with the characterization! There was collusion, sexism, and conspiracy at every level of this corporation to single out this innocent victimized woman. Therefore this penis-monster and his employer owe her one million dollars plus another twenty million in punitive damages.
Fun, huh?
Look---I send a lot of e-mail to coworkers who are only two or three cubes away. That way, our conversations can be asynchronous. The fact that we are using a written medium does not mean the conversation is not intended to be casual and ephemeral. The fact that I delete a piece of e-mail means that I consider it no longer relevant; either that I no longer endorse what it says or that I believe its context has disappeared. Say your boss is a Cardinals fan. He starts ridiculing the Braves in front of you and another Braves fan coworker. You tell him right to his face that he's full of shit, and he laughs and asks what the weather will be like in Atlanta for the last game of the series. Later, you send coworker an email that says "He's so full of shit!" You weren't talking about his qualifications as a manager; you were discussing his bogus sports opinions. But taken outside the context of the previous conversation, and your company has grounds to deny you a raise or fire you. After all, there it is in black and white, you saying your boss is full of shit.
I believe these are the sort of situations
Hizzoner was referring to.
The reason kiddie porn is almost universally outlawed is not because it is disgusting but because in order to create it you must sexually exploit a child.
Yes, there is such a thing as a sexually precocious child, and a couple of recent studies have found (to great outcry) that there is indeed a matter of degree when it comes to traumatization, but there are enough ten year old Cambodian girls being conscripted into what amount to rape camps so that kiddie porn and child prostitution can happen that I can see the merits of disrupting the revenue flow at every level. It is not the content itself that is condemned, but the fact that a crime must be committed in order to produce the content. Therefore governments feel justified in supressing this material, because making kpr0nz unpossessible makes it unbuyable makes it unsellable makes it unprofitable makes it stop being an industry.
The problem arises, though, that this model no longer applies. A digital camera and a modem can make anyone a pornographer. Plenty of Internet porn of the consenting adult variety is created without profit as a motivator. Kpr0nz are just as easy to produce. So now we face the dilemma that there is no revenue stream to disrupt: you aren't necessarily trying to destroy a commercial enterprise. The payment isn't money, but pride; sort of the Open Source philosophy as applied to naked people. But can even if certain transactions can be outlawed, can approval be outlawed as well? If it's illegal to sell it, is it illegal to give it away?
So what can be done about people who sexually exploit children just for the hell of it? I am inclined to say that without a revenue model, the current kpr0nz laws make less sense. Nevertheless, the producers thereof are severe assholes for doing what they are doing, money or no money. I will cheerfully endorse their prosecution, not because of what they are making, but because of what they are doing.
If we are back to a pure-speech issue about the material itself, whether to outlaw it becomes a somewhat more difficult question.
One last question, just to thicken the stew: What about material in which no sexual exploitation happened? For example: if you have ever seen a picture of a supermodel doctored up so that it looks like somebody just ejaculated on her face, would a picture of Jean Benet Ramsey doctored up the same way constitute child pornography? Where was the sexual exploitation?
Sonny, in *my* day, we actually had to hack into the slashdot mainframe
Luxury. I remember when if you wanted karma you had to drive to Rob's house, hide in the bushes overnight and when he left to go to work, jump out and threaten him with a pointy stick. That's how we got our karma, and we were proud to have it.
You got caught with evidence of criminal activity in plain sight, and I'd be glad.
Unreasonable search and seizure laws are designed to protect people against government meddling and other abuses
Speaking of unreasonable searches, the US Supreme Court is now considering Ky llo v. U.S., 99-8508, which will decide whether police helicopters hovering over your house pointing an infrared sensors at your roof constitutes a search or if they can just do it for the hell of it.
I'm just mentioning this because it's amazing how many technological innovations become the tools used to invade privacy. I mean, if it's okay for them to point an infrared sensor at your roof, is it okay for them to point a laser interferometer at your window to see if anyone inside is talking about drugs? It's non-invasive, right? They didn't actually enter your premises, right?
Battlebots suck. [...] Even Barney and Friends has more content.
Did anybody else here get a sudden flash of Barney being attacked by one of those whirlygig robots and getting turned into shredded upholstery? "I wuv ooo. Ooo wuv meeee." *CLANK*.
There is no question that labels manipulate musicians' egos to their own financial gain. "I'm gonna make you a star!" is a potent Siren call when you want to be admired. The whole thing is Faustian. I can think of no other human organization so bent on owning souls.
BTW, good point about the labels backing bankruptcy "reform." I always figured it was just the banks...
Do the record companies own the copyright to any works they produce automatically?
Briefly, yes. Look at the Copyright Act of 1978 (was it '78? Somewhere around then). It classifies recording as a musician "work for hire". Essentially, this means that the person for whom you do the work owns it, and contractually the record company "hires" you to record the music you wrote and performed, then distributes it. If they give you an advance, you have to pay it back through royalties. If you use studio time, you have to pay the label back for that, too. The artist will eventually see royalties that amount to a few dozen cents per album sold.
I was under the impression that artists own the copyright (and therefore have the right to control distribution) originally, and that in most cases they sign over this right to the record companies in their exclusive contracts.
A brief examination of the jewel box a CD came in can answer this question for you. Here--I'll go steal one out of the next cube over. Goodbye Jumbo by World Party. (C) and (P) Ensign Records Ltd. a sub. of Chrysalis Records Ltd. Dis. by Chrysalis Records, Inc. That's just one example, but I was confident enough to grab a CD off a desk for an example.
If that's the case, maybe artisits should not sign these contracts!
They're under no obligation to sign the contract. But if they don't sign the contract, the record company is under no obligation to distribute their music. And you know what? There are only four major record companies. They control 95% of the market. And they go to stores like Blockbuster or Whorehouse music or whatever they call it these days and they say, "Gee, we'd love to let you stock our albums, but we want to make sure you're a quality outfit, you understand, so let's make sure you only stock albums from, shall we say, reputable labels, such as ours, and these other three."
Things like Napster could shut down BMI and Sony and Universal and Time Warner forever, because Napster cuts them out of the artist/fan loop altogether. So they use their jointly-owned non-profit front organization, the RIAA, to file a lawsuit "on behalf of artists", to shut down Napster and Gnutella because they can be used to violate copyright, kind of like how Reynolds knives can be used to stab people.
If any other industry tried this sort of collusion, their executives would be locked away on racketeering charges and spend about a decade per count turning big rocks into little rocks. But the music industry has a lobby that would make the gun industry cream its pants, and so you get things like the Copyright Act of 1978.
Take a look at Salon's remarkable article Courtney Love does the math for further insight into what a record company contract is really like, and how there's no way around them if you want to be rewarded for your work.
Well, the cost of damage is typically said to be the cost of your property to its original state, or the fair market price of any property which was destroyed. This is a difficult thing to assess WRT data.
Appraisable or not, I emphatically believe that a computer's data is property. It can be stolen or vandalized, and an attempt to access it without the owner's express or implied consent is indeed trespassing. The metaphor extends quite nicely and allows existing laws to be applied in a novel situation. This suits me a lot better than creating new felonies for acts that in the real world are only misdemeanors.
The only question I have is one of jurisdiction: Did the crime happen at the location of the cracker or the cracked? What happens if I fire a gun across a state line to kill someone? I have a supicion that the murder happened where the victim was killed, not where the killer was standing.
I hereby promise I will not submit any code or algorithms to the contest. And I swear, it's not because I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm boycotting, dammit!
the average time served for all offenses, including murder, kidnapping, rape, and assault was LESS THAN 5 YEARS.
I met a former public defender once, who told me that rapists in her state served an average of four and a half years, out of an average seven year sentence. Then she told me about having to defend kids who were facing a mandatory ten for holding five grams of crack. I remember her exact words: "How do I tell someone that their five grams of crack is worse than raping a woman?"
Window breaker gets 10 years. Sub-headlines: Police cracking down on window breaking problem
This will have as much an effect as those "Police cracking down on teen marijuana use" headlines. The police issue that press release almost as often as they issue the one about "Police cracking down on speeders." Most speeders don't even know how big the fines are, or care. Focus on not getting caught; worry about the consequences when the time comes.
Sometimes the crime is the motivation. And it's not the severity of punishment, but its certainty that is the deterrent.
Breaking and entering is a property crime; the presence or absence of a homeowner is irrelevant. B&E does, however, typically stipulate that damage ("breaking") was done pursuant to trespass ("entering").
Even if no damage was done, breaking into someone else's computer is sure as hell an act of criminal trespass.
Here's how the State of Georgia, for example, defines criminal trespass:
(b) A person commits the offense of criminal trespass when he or she knowingly and without authority:
(1) Enters upon the land or premises of another person or into any part of any vehicle, railroad car, aircraft, or watercraft of another person for an unlawful purpose;
(2) Enters upon the land or premises of another person or into any part of any vehicle, railroad car, aircraft, or watercraft of another person after receiving, prior to such entry, notice from the owner, rightful occupant, or, upon proper identification, an authorized representative of the owner or rightful occupant that such entry is forbidden; or
(3) Remains upon the land or premises of another person or within the vehicle, railroad car, aircraft, or watercraft of another person after receiving notice from the owner, rightful occupant, or, upon proper identification, an authorized representative of the owner or rightful occupant to depart.
If a computer is an extention of my premeses, this sounds like cracking to me; frankly I'd be much more upset with you if you were going through my computer files than my tool shed.
One important difference, though, between criminal tresspass and whatever tough-on-crime bullshit they've got going on in Michigan, is that criminal tresspass is a misdemeanor, not grounds for a five year prison term.
It's not differential pricing I'm talking about; it's gambling. Making a giveaway contest (e.g. free Big Macs) not be gambling is why you always see the words "no purchase necessary" somewhere in the rules along with instructions for entering the contest without making a purchase (e.g. send a SASE to "Free Big Mac Contest c/o blah blah blah"). You also see "void where prohibited", but I've never lived where it would be prohibited so I don't know where or why it is prohibited.
That fewer than one percent of contestants ever mail in a request for a free game piece is testimony to the promotional value of the contest, but technically it's still not gambling.
I commend you for finding an easy way around the e-mail address issue, but I disagree with you about IP addresses being useful for tracking. When was the last time your ISP gave you a static IP address? All Compaq could tell from my IP is that a Mindspring subscriber downloaded their file. To find out anything at all about me via that IP address, they would have to subpoena Mindspring's logs to see who was using it at a given time.
The "license agreement" looks like a bunch of legal boilerplate, quite similar to that at the bottome of another download page.
Two gets you five the broken license was a miscommunication between a management drone and a legal department drone.
What bothers me though is the whole setup: what you do is submit your first and last name, and your e-mail address, and they e-mail you a "personalized Linux Jukebox download URL". How's that for tracking?
We also wanted you to know that if we conduct any price tests in the future, all customers who order items affected by these tests will automatically be refunded any price difference at the conclusion of the test, thereby ensuring that they will pay the lowest available price.
Are they encouraging us to gamble? Picture this: a DVD you really want is going for $30. If you thing there's a chance they may offer it to someone else for $25, that means you're gambling on a $5 refund somewhere. So maybe this is a way of luring people into paying full price on certain items in the hopes Amazon will adjust the price down and give you some money back.
Okay, conspiracies abound. But I know that if an online business came out and said "one out of every hundred purchasers will randomly receive a five dollar credit towards their next purchase," the gubment would go nuts.
To grossly misapply your car analogy, there is an old anecdote about a car designed by Ken Thompson. There were no instruments on the dashboard at all, except for a single question mark. If the driver made a mistake, the ? would light up. "The experienced driver," said Ken, "will usually know what's wrong."
I also use good old-fashioned Unix tools; when I run Windows I typically import something like the
mks toolkits and I have standard programs that I'm used to for finding things and comparing them and so on.
I took the entire statement to read, "I use MS tools to do Windows because I don't want to have to bother with all the obscure, non-portable elements of the Windows development environment. Furthermore, in order to get actual work done under Windows, I set up a Unix emulation for my environment."
Who owns the 2000 Olympics' website? If it is owned by--or subsidized by--the Australian govenment, they certainly do have fair say in how the site's information is presented.
If on the other hand the gubment has no claim to ownership, your argument certainly merits attention.
The gripping hand, though, is that if the site is hosted in Australia, we could hold that its accessibility is beholden to the same laws that govern access to, say, any Australian building, regardless of ownership, that is open to the public. Which raises the question of what will the ALT tags on something like www.porno.com.au, if there is such a site, would look like:
Slashdot Mirror
If he gets elected, you get disappeared. I'm guessing it's Nader Time for you.
--
The judge is not talking about criminal law, but civil law. In criminal law, evidence does not "expire", but as you cannot be prosecuted for certain crimes after a given period of time has passed since the alleged offense, the evidence is moot. The idea is that you shouldn't throw a forty-year-old man in jail for a red light he ran when he was eighteen. I should point out that in most jurisdictions there is no statute of limitations on murder and other infamous crimes.
What the judge is trying to do is limit the viability of e-mail in civil litigation. Hypothetical situation: four years ago one of your coworkers made a huge, obsessive, gigantic stink about something, and you end up wasting an entire week chasing shadows as a result. When you tell her she was wrong and wasted your time, she fires off an angry e-mail to your boss. Your boss forwards it to you with a note attached, "What's this about?" You reply, "Remember how I showed you that Foobley component wouldn't work in the Warbley project? She's still bitching about it." He writes back one line: "I figured as much."
After four more years of similar raving nonsense on every single project she's on, nobody takes her seriously about anything anymore. Feeling like there must be some other reason she's been ostracized, she quits the company and sues for sexual harassment. All e-mail records from every employee she has ever worked with get subpoenaed. Your e-mail from four years ago is dredged up. And in it, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this bigoted, sexist monster used the vile, derogatory term "bitch" to refer to my client, a person of gender! This degenerate, immature pig used vicious, defamatory language in the workplace, thereby creating a hostile work environment for my poor victimized client. And instead of taking immediate corrective action, this penis-monster's boss, another penis-monster, conspired to agree with the characterization! There was collusion, sexism, and conspiracy at every level of this corporation to single out this innocent victimized woman. Therefore this penis-monster and his employer owe her one million dollars plus another twenty million in punitive damages.
Fun, huh?
Look---I send a lot of e-mail to coworkers who are only two or three cubes away. That way, our conversations can be asynchronous. The fact that we are using a written medium does not mean the conversation is not intended to be casual and ephemeral. The fact that I delete a piece of e-mail means that I consider it no longer relevant; either that I no longer endorse what it says or that I believe its context has disappeared. Say your boss is a Cardinals fan. He starts ridiculing the Braves in front of you and another Braves fan coworker. You tell him right to his face that he's full of shit, and he laughs and asks what the weather will be like in Atlanta for the last game of the series. Later, you send coworker an email that says "He's so full of shit!" You weren't talking about his qualifications as a manager; you were discussing his bogus sports opinions. But taken outside the context of the previous conversation, and your company has grounds to deny you a raise or fire you. After all, there it is in black and white, you saying your boss is full of shit.
I believe these are the sort of situations Hizzoner was referring to.
--
What will happen to us now that Microsoft has acccess to the source code for Linux?
--
Yes, there is such a thing as a sexually precocious child, and a couple of recent studies have found (to great outcry) that there is indeed a matter of degree when it comes to traumatization, but there are enough ten year old Cambodian girls being conscripted into what amount to rape camps so that kiddie porn and child prostitution can happen that I can see the merits of disrupting the revenue flow at every level. It is not the content itself that is condemned, but the fact that a crime must be committed in order to produce the content. Therefore governments feel justified in supressing this material, because making kpr0nz unpossessible makes it unbuyable makes it unsellable makes it unprofitable makes it stop being an industry.
The problem arises, though, that this model no longer applies. A digital camera and a modem can make anyone a pornographer. Plenty of Internet porn of the consenting adult variety is created without profit as a motivator. Kpr0nz are just as easy to produce. So now we face the dilemma that there is no revenue stream to disrupt: you aren't necessarily trying to destroy a commercial enterprise. The payment isn't money, but pride; sort of the Open Source philosophy as applied to naked people. But can even if certain transactions can be outlawed, can approval be outlawed as well? If it's illegal to sell it, is it illegal to give it away?
So what can be done about people who sexually exploit children just for the hell of it? I am inclined to say that without a revenue model, the current kpr0nz laws make less sense. Nevertheless, the producers thereof are severe assholes for doing what they are doing, money or no money. I will cheerfully endorse their prosecution, not because of what they are making, but because of what they are doing.
If we are back to a pure-speech issue about the material itself, whether to outlaw it becomes a somewhat more difficult question.
One last question, just to thicken the stew: What about material in which no sexual exploitation happened? For example: if you have ever seen a picture of a supermodel doctored up so that it looks like somebody just ejaculated on her face, would a picture of Jean Benet Ramsey doctored up the same way constitute child pornography? Where was the sexual exploitation?
--
--
I'm just mentioning this because it's amazing how many technological innovations become the tools used to invade privacy. I mean, if it's okay for them to point an infrared sensor at your roof, is it okay for them to point a laser interferometer at your window to see if anyone inside is talking about drugs? It's non-invasive, right? They didn't actually enter your premises, right?
All this ties in so well with the EU/US anti-privacy treaty in the works.
--
--
go.sysin dd *, do dah, do dah.
--
--
There is no question that labels manipulate musicians' egos to their own financial gain. "I'm gonna make you a star!" is a potent Siren call when you want to be admired. The whole thing is Faustian. I can think of no other human organization so bent on owning souls.
BTW, good point about the labels backing bankruptcy "reform." I always figured it was just the banks...
--
It's not 95% of the market, it's closer to %90, and somebody else can better describe the exact way major labels enforce their distribution channels.
--
Things like Napster could shut down BMI and Sony and Universal and Time Warner forever, because Napster cuts them out of the artist/fan loop altogether. So they use their jointly-owned non-profit front organization, the RIAA, to file a lawsuit "on behalf of artists", to shut down Napster and Gnutella because they can be used to violate copyright, kind of like how Reynolds knives can be used to stab people.
If any other industry tried this sort of collusion, their executives would be locked away on racketeering charges and spend about a decade per count turning big rocks into little rocks. But the music industry has a lobby that would make the gun industry cream its pants, and so you get things like the Copyright Act of 1978.
Take a look at Salon's remarkable article Courtney Love does the math for further insight into what a record company contract is really like, and how there's no way around them if you want to be rewarded for your work.
--
Appraisable or not, I emphatically believe that a computer's data is property. It can be stolen or vandalized, and an attempt to access it without the owner's express or implied consent is indeed trespassing. The metaphor extends quite nicely and allows existing laws to be applied in a novel situation. This suits me a lot better than creating new felonies for acts that in the real world are only misdemeanors.
The only question I have is one of jurisdiction: Did the crime happen at the location of the cracker or the cracked? What happens if I fire a gun across a state line to kill someone? I have a supicion that the murder happened where the victim was killed, not where the killer was standing.
--
I hereby promise I will not submit any code or algorithms to the contest. And I swear, it's not because I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm boycotting, dammit!
--
--
Sometimes the crime is the motivation. And it's not the severity of punishment, but its certainty that is the deterrent.
--
Even if no damage was done, breaking into someone else's computer is sure as hell an act of criminal trespass.
Here's how the State of Georgia, for example, defines criminal trespass:
If a computer is an extention of my premeses, this sounds like cracking to me; frankly I'd be much more upset with you if you were going through my computer files than my tool shed.One important difference, though, between criminal tresspass and whatever tough-on-crime bullshit they've got going on in Michigan, is that criminal tresspass is a misdemeanor, not grounds for a five year prison term.
--
That fewer than one percent of contestants ever mail in a request for a free game piece is testimony to the promotional value of the contest, but technically it's still not gambling.
--
I commend you for finding an easy way around the e-mail address issue, but I disagree with you about IP addresses being useful for tracking. When was the last time your ISP gave you a static IP address? All Compaq could tell from my IP is that a Mindspring subscriber downloaded their file. To find out anything at all about me via that IP address, they would have to subpoena Mindspring's logs to see who was using it at a given time.
--
Two gets you five the broken license was a miscommunication between a management drone and a legal department drone.
What bothers me though is the whole setup: what you do is submit your first and last name, and your e-mail address, and they e-mail you a "personalized Linux Jukebox download URL". How's that for tracking?
--
Are they encouraging us to gamble? Picture this: a DVD you really want is going for $30. If you thing there's a chance they may offer it to someone else for $25, that means you're gambling on a $5 refund somewhere. So maybe this is a way of luring people into paying full price on certain items in the hopes Amazon will adjust the price down and give you some money back.
Okay, conspiracies abound. But I know that if an online business came out and said "one out of every hundred purchasers will randomly receive a five dollar credit towards their next purchase," the gubment would go nuts.
--
I read it as Primary Key. Guess what I've been doing for a living?
--
To grossly misapply your car analogy, there is an old anecdote about a car designed by Ken Thompson. There were no instruments on the dashboard at all, except for a single question mark. If the driver made a mistake, the ? would light up. "The experienced driver," said Ken, "will usually know what's wrong."
--
--
If on the other hand the gubment has no claim to ownership, your argument certainly merits attention.
The gripping hand, though, is that if the site is hosted in Australia, we could hold that its accessibility is beholden to the same laws that govern access to, say, any Australian building, regardless of ownership, that is open to the public. Which raises the question of what will the ALT tags on something like www.porno.com.au, if there is such a site, would look like:
Which makes me think that the analogy between being blind and running Lynx is becoming more accurate every day.
--