The article summary (and orginal Valleywag article) are misleading. They both fail to note that the Facebook EULA allows you to revoke the license by removing your content: "If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire..."
Facebook could never create a stock photography site -- it's customers can cause the license to the content to expire at any time.
Frankly, the Facebook EULA is quite reasonable. Facebook needs rights to the content that it has on the site, and that is what it asks for.
I represented an company that had developed a closed source software product that had incorporated several open source (but not GPL'ed) libraries, each released under a different license.
There was a transaction cost, in that the company had to pay my law firm to review each license to be sure the distribution of the product did not violate the license. Some of the licenses had attribution requirements, including one which required the verbatim reproduction of the open source license within the distribution. I advised my client as such, and they included that license within a readme file, complete with the glaring typos that were in the original.
The cost of a junior lawyer spending a few hours reviewing six different licenses (approx $300 per hour) was lower than recreating the code from scratch -- so it is hard to argue that the proliferation of licenses is problematic. My client was still better off than if it had to spend an extra week of development time authoring the libraries.
Tar is still chewed regularly in Finland 5,000 years later. I just visited a friend who lives outside of Helsinki. He uses "tar" smelling shampoo and drinks tar flavored liquor.
I had a few of the tar candies -- personally, I think the stuff has a disgusting flavor/smell -- a horrific combination of charcoal and black licorice.
They don't call it the rocket docket for nuthin'
> expertise and instead of days, there was only a 30 minute per side argument per side for 48 claims over 7 patents -- and there's a pretty strong case for appeal.
It should not be forgotten when convenient that the Supreme Court's role is limited to combing through the constitutionality of a past ruling....that's the legislature's job to fix, not the Court's.
That is not completely accurate. The Supreme Court does not merely pass on the consitutionality of legislation; it also gets the final word in interpreting existing legislation. In this case, the constitutionality of the legislation is not at issue. What is at issue is the interpretation of existing legislation. Specifically, the arugment is what standard should be used when deciding whether to grant a patent holder an injunction. The statute provides that courts "may" grant injunctions "in accordance with principles of equity" and "on such terms as they deem reasonable." 35 U.S.C. 283. Over the past 20 years, the Federal Circuit, which has appellate authority in patent cases, has interpreted this clause to mean that injunctions should be granted almost automatically once infringement has been established (with some exceptions for when safety is at issue). One hopes that the Supreme Court will interpret the clause to mean that District Court has discretion to issue an injunction, but only on a showing that an injunction is equitable.
Thus, for example, a company like RIM probably wouldn't be shut down by a patent troll, even on a finding infringement. Instead RIM would just have to pay a court ordered fine/licence to the troll.
To be fair, HBO is very likely planning a DVD release of the entire first season of Rome at the end of the year. HBO probably hopes that you would the purchase the set rather than go thru the hassle of a slower torrent.
2: They're stopping potential customers from seeing their show. I don't have HBO (not sure I can get it here anyway, but let's say I can). So what if I download and episode, realize that I really like it, and want to sign up? Well, they've stopped me from doing that, or at least tried.
I used to work at an online retailer. The only product reviews that we would remove outright would be ones that used profanity.
On occasion, one of the product companies would see a bad review of their product on our website and complain to us.
We would then set up a conversation between the product company and the complaining customer. Often, the product company would immediately work to remedy the problems that the customer had with the product, and the customer would then give permission to withdraw the negative review. At the very least, the negative reviewer would post an addenda to the review mentioning how much trouble the product company went to in order to satisfy him/her.
That seemed to work fairly well. The bad reviews generally remained with bad products, and product companies that cared about the quality perception of their product had a second chance to fix any problems.
The BSD license does more than purely dedicate code to the public domain. The license also disclaims tort and contract liability for any problems resulting from the code.
So, for example, if someone uses your code library as part of the software in a dialysis machine, and a bug in your code winds up crashing the machine, and killing the patient, you theoretically cannot be sued for wrongful death. However, no one, to my knowledge, has actually tested the legal validity of the disclaimer in court at this point.
IANAL (yet).
Actually no, it can't be hacked together
on
Yahoo! Acquires Oddpost
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What you are missing is that this is not a mid-ninties email client in HTML. It is a present day DHTML client.
If you had tried it out, you would know that means you don't have to reload the browser window to see your next message. You have access to shortcut keys, auto-compeletion and left & right mouse menus.
It is extremely difficult to get advanced DHTML to work, even if you are doing it exclusively on certain versions of IE. There are numerous browser specific quirks (read: bugs) specific to each DOM.
There is no way you could hack this together in a couple months much less a couple hours.
Why would we donate money Daniel Peng? Yeah, he got screwed, but the fact is he settled rather than fight. I'd be willing to donate $ for his legal bills had he opted to fight the RIAA lawsuit -- but not now; why should we give him money to help pay the settlement, when it will go straight to the RIAA?
The poster and article mistake the reason for automakers being reluctant to standardize on specific crash data. The reason isn't likely a desire to be able to sell the data in proprietary format (which would likely yeild minimal additional revenues compared to their existing revenue streams). The real reason is very likely that easy cross-automaker comparisons would lead to liability issues. If driving a Ford Explorer at 30 mph around a sharp left turn leads to twice as many accident deaths as a Isuzu Trooper (or whatever), Ford could be held accountable in a lawsuit. If plaintiff's lawyers had easy access to data that could be compared between different automakers, the automakers would be in big trouble, given the state of litigation of in this country.
Slashdot Mirror
The article summary (and orginal Valleywag article) are misleading. They both fail to note that the Facebook EULA allows you to revoke the license by removing your content: "If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire..." Facebook could never create a stock photography site -- it's customers can cause the license to the content to expire at any time. Frankly, the Facebook EULA is quite reasonable. Facebook needs rights to the content that it has on the site, and that is what it asks for.
I represented an company that had developed a closed source software product that had incorporated several open source (but not GPL'ed) libraries, each released under a different license.
There was a transaction cost, in that the company had to pay my law firm to review each license to be sure the distribution of the product did not violate the license. Some of the licenses had attribution requirements, including one which required the verbatim reproduction of the open source license within the distribution. I advised my client as such, and they included that license within a readme file, complete with the glaring typos that were in the original.
The cost of a junior lawyer spending a few hours reviewing six different licenses (approx $300 per hour) was lower than recreating the code from scratch -- so it is hard to argue that the proliferation of licenses is problematic. My client was still better off than if it had to spend an extra week of development time authoring the libraries.
Tar is still chewed regularly in Finland 5,000 years later. I just visited a friend who lives outside of Helsinki. He uses "tar" smelling shampoo and drinks tar flavored liquor. I had a few of the tar candies -- personally, I think the stuff has a disgusting flavor/smell -- a horrific combination of charcoal and black licorice.
They don't call it the rocket docket for nuthin' > expertise and instead of days, there was only a 30 minute per side argument per side for 48 claims over 7 patents -- and there's a pretty strong case for appeal.
That is not completely accurate. The Supreme Court does not merely pass on the consitutionality of legislation; it also gets the final word in interpreting existing legislation. In this case, the constitutionality of the legislation is not at issue. What is at issue is the interpretation of existing legislation. Specifically, the arugment is what standard should be used when deciding whether to grant a patent holder an injunction. The statute provides that courts "may" grant injunctions "in accordance with principles of equity" and "on such terms as they deem reasonable." 35 U.S.C. 283. Over the past 20 years, the Federal Circuit, which has appellate authority in patent cases, has interpreted this clause to mean that injunctions should be granted almost automatically once infringement has been established (with some exceptions for when safety is at issue). One hopes that the Supreme Court will interpret the clause to mean that District Court has discretion to issue an injunction, but only on a showing that an injunction is equitable.
Thus, for example, a company like RIM probably wouldn't be shut down by a patent troll, even on a finding infringement. Instead RIM would just have to pay a court ordered fine/licence to the troll.
1) Slaughter a pig.
2) Slice the hide into 120 footballs.
3) Serve the leftovers as bacon during the pre-game tailgate.
All the footballs have the same DNA.
The glow is related to the discount the company received by purchasing from Chernobyl pig farmers.
To be fair, HBO is very likely planning a DVD release of the entire first season of Rome at the end of the year. HBO probably hopes that you would the purchase the set rather than go thru the hassle of a slower torrent.
2: They're stopping potential customers from seeing their show. I don't have HBO (not sure I can get it here anyway, but let's say I can). So what if I download and episode, realize that I really like it, and want to sign up? Well, they've stopped me from doing that, or at least tried.
I used to work at an online retailer. The only product reviews that we would remove outright would be ones that used profanity.
On occasion, one of the product companies would see a bad review of their product on our website and complain to us.
We would then set up a conversation between the product company and the complaining customer. Often, the product company would immediately work to remedy the problems that the customer had with the product, and the customer would then give permission to withdraw the negative review. At the very least, the negative reviewer would post an addenda to the review mentioning how much trouble the product company went to in order to satisfy him/her.
That seemed to work fairly well. The bad reviews generally remained with bad products, and product companies that cared about the quality perception of their product had a second chance to fix any problems.
The BSD license does more than purely dedicate code to the public domain. The license also disclaims tort and contract liability for any problems resulting from the code.
So, for example, if someone uses your code library as part of the software in a dialysis machine, and a bug in your code winds up crashing the machine, and killing the patient, you theoretically cannot be sued for wrongful death. However, no one, to my knowledge, has actually tested the legal validity of the disclaimer in court at this point.
IANAL (yet).
What you are missing is that this is not a mid-ninties email client in HTML. It is a present day DHTML client.
If you had tried it out, you would know that means you don't have to reload the browser window to see your next message. You have access to shortcut keys, auto-compeletion and left & right mouse menus.
It is extremely difficult to get advanced DHTML to work, even if you are doing it exclusively on certain versions of IE. There are numerous browser specific quirks (read: bugs) specific to each DOM.
There is no way you could hack this together in a couple months much less a couple hours.
Why would we donate money Daniel Peng? Yeah, he got screwed, but the fact is he settled rather than fight. I'd be willing to donate $ for his legal bills had he opted to fight the RIAA lawsuit -- but not now; why should we give him money to help pay the settlement, when it will go straight to the RIAA?
The poster and article mistake the reason for automakers being reluctant to standardize on specific crash data. The reason isn't likely a desire to be able to sell the data in proprietary format (which would likely yeild minimal additional revenues compared to their existing revenue streams). The real reason is very likely that easy cross-automaker comparisons would lead to liability issues. If driving a Ford Explorer at 30 mph around a sharp left turn leads to twice as many accident deaths as a Isuzu Trooper (or whatever), Ford could be held accountable in a lawsuit. If plaintiff's lawyers had easy access to data that could be compared between different automakers, the automakers would be in big trouble, given the state of litigation of in this country.