But now that the RIAA has what it wanted, the group is unsure about how to go about sending out its pre-litigation settlement letters. Some of the students are represented by an attorney, meaning that the RIAA is barred from contacting them directly. They can send the letter to the lawyer or they can serve the student with a lawsuit.
There was an article just a couple days ago on here about a case where a Federal Magistrate held that a password was protected.
In my opinion, it was sound reasoning. The court said that the Fifth Amendment applies only to testimony. By giving the password, the defendant would in effect be testifying (1) that he had the password and (2) that he had access to the content protected by the password. Both of those admissions could be incriminating, so the government could not force him to reveal it.
That was just a ruling from a lower court though. It is not a precedent that any other court has to follow (though they may find it persuasive, as I do). We can't predict how other courts will rule.
First it was the music industry and the movie industry complaining about easy copying of their content.
Now it's regular people whose digital information can be copied in full by law enforcement on crossing the border. Law enforcement can then take as much time as it wants examining the data bit by bit, reading your creative writing, sex videos with your wife, planning outlines, trade secrets, the next edition of "Harry Potter" if you are JK Rowling, etc.
The old rule is that you have no privacy interest when you cross the border. But now the privacy intrusion has the potential to be far greater than ever before. Maybe we need a new rule. Or maybe we just need to keep our info encrypted. Or save it on a flash drive sealed inside a swallowed condom.
I'm sure your scientific insight would make the researchers feel bad for conducting experiments rather than simply making assumptions. I think you are trying to be facetious, but it should be obvious that I'm not arguing with the experiment.
Rather, I'm commenting on the assumption revealed by the experiment's description.
It should be no surprise that the brain treats tools as an extension of the body, because that's exactly what tools are.
There is nothing that we do which does not affect the outside world. And there is nothing we do which the outside world does not affect. The illusion is in the initial perception of separateness and not in the realization that it is part of us.
Treating the world as an extension of ourselves is a form of enlightenment, not trickery.
This is not a decision approving the tactics of law firms that try to silence people that they sue (though it may have that temporary effect).
The only issue here was whether to quash the subpoena to identify the person who posted the C&D letter. All you have to show to support such a subpoena is a prima facie case. That means that you only have to show that you have met the initial elements of your claim. Meaning that they posted something and it was your copyrighted work.
The question of whether this is Fair Use (and I can't imagine that it wouldn't be) has not been decided. That's not part of the prima facie case of copyright infringement, rather, it is an affirmative defense that the defendant must raise and argue.
Really, the judge should have taken note of the First Amendment implications of all this and quashed the subpoena anyway.... I mean, really.
The Defendant will now have to litigate the case, but if he wins, the "precedent" will be just as persuasive, if not more.
All the court said is that the prima facie evidence exists to let the subpoena stand for the simple reason that the slimy law firm registered the copyright of the letter. However, the court acknowledges that the defendant has "valid arguments" on their claim that the letter cannot be copyrighted. The court simply says that the analysis of those claims is beyond the scope of determining to quash the subpoena, and the prima facie case is sufficient to let the subpoena stand. As I see it, the defendant will now have to go to court and challenge the copyright directly instead of the validity of the subpoena. Of course, this is/., and I am not a lawyer. You pretty much took the words right out of my mouth... except for that last part.
Jeff Gould presents an interesting analysis in Interop News: How can an open source software company with $70 million or so in revenue and no profits to speak of be worth $1 billion? That's the question Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been trying to answer since he bought MySQL last week. Wouldn't it seem like a good idea to answer those questions BEFORE spending a billion dollars?
not even counting the initial cost of creating the infrastucture. The infrastructure is already there. Many of their products already have rfids, and they already use them to deter theft.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just have an rfid on each package?
Pallets are just a bunch of wood. That doesn't give you a direct indicator of your product. It just tells you that that pallet is sitting there. Someone could have removed half of the product from it already, but the rfid reader would indicate that the whole shipment is right there.
I'm looking forward to this so that I can shop at walmart again without having some annoying person ask to see my receipt as I leave. If it's embedded in the actual product, they can make sure that any item from their inventory going out the door has been paid for. That reduces shrinkage costs (aka theft losses), lets them reduce the number of employees dedicated to loss-prevention, and lets me leave without either being interrupted or telling someone to shove off.
Well, if you RTFA, one could infer that referring to the garage as the Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage could be construed as threatening to university president Zaccari. It's wasn't just the Project Spotlight link. It could be. But it's more likely a reference to the fact that the University President was on his way to retire and was using funds from student fees to build the Parking Garage.
After all, "Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage" has a certain ironic ring to it. As if the University President really thinks that in a hundred years, he will be remembered for a parking garage. It's the sort of thing that if I were a student there and immersed in this issue when seeing that sign, I would probably laugh and think "what a fool Zaccari is."
When a communication has several plausible innocent meanings, it hardly presents the threat of a clear and present danger just because someone chose to take it out of context and give it the threatening meaning. Based on TFA, Zaccari pointed to a couple things from an online profile (one of which was a mere advertisement placed there by Facebook). Who among us could not be characterized in an unfair way similarly to the way this student was characterized?
The entire world as your development group is much more powerful over the long haul than a bunch of guys on the payroll in Cupertino or in Redmond.
It doesn't matter whether you are enamored with or spiteful toward what Linux is NOW.
It's what it has the potential to become, as compared to the old development model of paying a bunch of guys in an office and keeping the guts of their creation under lock and key so that no one else is allowed to improve upon their work, ever.
Linux's strength is in it's staying power. It's not going anywhere. You can't kill it the way you can a start-up company... or even a large and powerful company.
It's still largely a hobbyist platform. (Remember, I'm talking about Linux on the desktop, not on the server.) But given a time-span long enough, Linux is bound to be a major player on the desktop (possibly even the dominant player).
The economics of Linux don't place the same value on a perfected user experience. But it does place some value on user experience. That value only goes up over time. What was the most user-friendly Linux distribution in 1996? What was the installation like back then? Now compare that with installing today's Ubuntu or SUSE or Fedora or Mandriva or almost any distribution that you randomly pick off the front page of distrowatch.com. The difference is huge, and the user experience can only continue to improve.
If Steve Jobs is the great master of the user experience, what will happen to Apple if when he quits or dies? I don't know the answer to that.
But I know what will happen to Linux if Linus Torvalds dies... Pretty much nothing. Linux is analogous to the internet. It keeps getting bigger and better, and it has no weak link. The same cannot be said for Apple or Microsoft.
There's even a report of a girl getting the sex offender label for having sex with a younger boyfriend. You mean this one?
"A 26-year-old college student on federal disability, Whitaker doesn't fit most people's image of a sex offender. But, because of an ill-considered 10th-grade blowjob -- resulting in her conviction for an act that's no longer crime in Georgia -- she has spent nearly a decade on Georgia's sex-offender registry."
The sex offender registry laws are an absurdity. It's essentially a life sentence that applies to a huge swath of activity that we deem "deviant", not just child molesters.
In Georgia, the laws are so badly written, that no lawyer can really tell you what's required of an offender.
For example, I had a homeless client (registered sex offender) charged with failure to update his address after he had "moved". But the law says "homeless does not constitute an address." So does that mean that there is no address change and that he has committed no crime? (the position we took) Or does it mean that it's illegal to be homeless?
The court saw that ours was a plausible interpretation of the statute and dismissed the case. But the opinion of most lawyers in this state is that the sex offender law makes it illegal for a registered sex offender to be homeless.
Linus Torvalds uses alpine. I'm going to try it out just for nostalgia's sake. Pine was the first email client I can remember using (not including compuserve's "email" client or those that ran on private BBSes and didn't allow sending messages outside).
I've tried using mutt, but there seems to be a big learning curve before a mere mortal can use it. Pine was self-explanatory from the start, with on-screen menus that made everything easy. On the other hand, Pine ran on a university server that was already configured for my account. So my memory may be colored by the fact that I didn't have to set up Postfix or create mail directories, which may have been necessary had I run Pine on my own computer.
APC: What software do you use everyday? Your browser, desktop (if any), email client and so on?
LT: Well, ignoring the actual development stuff (make, compiler, editor etc), it ends up being mostly just xterms and "alpine" (the newer version of the venerable old "pine" email reader. Strictly text-based, thank you very much).
It flies in the face of reality, but the NCAA has been held repeatedly to be a non-governmental actor. Meaning that the Bill of Rights does not apply to it.
This, in spite of the fact that most of the member schools are public universities.
It's targeted at people with press credentials. If you have press credentials, you probably aren't sitting in the stands. You are probably in the press area. And since you have applied for and received these credentials, they know who you are.
How would they detect it? By checking your blog probably.
Can they stop Joe Everybody from doing it? As a practical matter, probably not. And they probably aren't too worried about Joe Everybody (at least not yet). As for the legal issues, I don't see a problem with it. It's their game, and they set the rules. If you break the rules, they kick you out.
So they lock down these files with DRM. Then DVD-Jon (or someone else) comes up with a DRM-stripping program for the files.
Then people can re-encode the files to their format of choice. But by then, most consumers have said "fuck it" and decided to just download their format of choice directly from p2p or usenet because it's easier and simpler than paying Apple and still violating the DMCA just so the music they paid for will work on the audio player they own.
Oh wait, that's already the status quo... Never mind.
What exactly has changed since 1988 that should make this law different?
If the law says that this information must be kept private, the internet and computers don't make it any less private.
Rather, the newfound popularity of the internet and computers should make privacy even more important, because once information is released, it spreads far more quickly and easily.
You can't expect the judge to know all about email headers and what Slashdot is. She's just a judge. Computers are not her business. You have to explain how it works and why she should find that it is a "bulk email".
Judging by how you wrote the article, I'm going to guess that you didn't give a full explanation to the judge. And I doubt that you explained your background and expertise in computers (assuming that you have some) so she could have an adequate basis to determine that you know what you're talking about.
Whenever you sue someone, you have the burden to prove each and every element of your claim. It sounds to me like you didn't even attempt to meet that burden. And now you blame the judge for not knowing as much as you do about computers.
It is perfectly logical to be sell your individual right to vote for a large sum of money. One individual's right to vote is worth little other than the warm feeling one gets for taking part in the process. One person's vote is very unlikely to determine the winner of an important election.
What's more valuable is the public's right to vote. I might be willing to sell my own vote, but if everybody sold their right to vote, we would no longer have a representative democracy and tyranny would surely be around the corner.
I would gladly sell my right to vote if a proper sum were offered. But I would strongly oppose allowing anyone else to do the same.
Prostituion is a basic human urge? Sex is, but sex per se is legal everywhere (even North Korea). Well, they don't call it the oldest profession for nothing.
To be precise, I suppose I meant to refer to "pandering" rather than prostitution.
Some would say that prostitution is a basic human urge for females... but that's not the meaning I intended.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple.
There was an article just a couple days ago on here about a case where a Federal Magistrate held that a password was protected.
In my opinion, it was sound reasoning. The court said that the Fifth Amendment applies only to testimony. By giving the password, the defendant would in effect be testifying (1) that he had the password and (2) that he had access to the content protected by the password. Both of those admissions could be incriminating, so the government could not force him to reveal it.
That was just a ruling from a lower court though. It is not a precedent that any other court has to follow (though they may find it persuasive, as I do). We can't predict how other courts will rule.
First it was the music industry and the movie industry complaining about easy copying of their content.
Now it's regular people whose digital information can be copied in full by law enforcement on crossing the border. Law enforcement can then take as much time as it wants examining the data bit by bit, reading your creative writing, sex videos with your wife, planning outlines, trade secrets, the next edition of "Harry Potter" if you are JK Rowling, etc.
The old rule is that you have no privacy interest when you cross the border. But now the privacy intrusion has the potential to be far greater than ever before. Maybe we need a new rule. Or maybe we just need to keep our info encrypted. Or save it on a flash drive sealed inside a swallowed condom.
Rather, I'm commenting on the assumption revealed by the experiment's description.
It should be no surprise that the brain treats tools as an extension of the body, because that's exactly what tools are.
There is nothing that we do which does not affect the outside world. And there is nothing we do which the outside world does not affect. The illusion is in the initial perception of separateness and not in the realization that it is part of us.
Treating the world as an extension of ourselves is a form of enlightenment, not trickery.
This is not a decision approving the tactics of law firms that try to silence people that they sue (though it may have that temporary effect).
The only issue here was whether to quash the subpoena to identify the person who posted the C&D letter. All you have to show to support such a subpoena is a prima facie case. That means that you only have to show that you have met the initial elements of your claim. Meaning that they posted something and it was your copyrighted work.
The question of whether this is Fair Use (and I can't imagine that it wouldn't be) has not been decided. That's not part of the prima facie case of copyright infringement, rather, it is an affirmative defense that the defendant must raise and argue.
Really, the judge should have taken note of the First Amendment implications of all this and quashed the subpoena anyway.... I mean, really.
The Defendant will now have to litigate the case, but if he wins, the "precedent" will be just as persuasive, if not more.
I stand corrected. Thank you for the informative response.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just have an rfid on each package?
Pallets are just a bunch of wood. That doesn't give you a direct indicator of your product. It just tells you that that pallet is sitting there. Someone could have removed half of the product from it already, but the rfid reader would indicate that the whole shipment is right there.
I'm looking forward to this so that I can shop at walmart again without having some annoying person ask to see my receipt as I leave. If it's embedded in the actual product, they can make sure that any item from their inventory going out the door has been paid for. That reduces shrinkage costs (aka theft losses), lets them reduce the number of employees dedicated to loss-prevention, and lets me leave without either being interrupted or telling someone to shove off.
After all, "Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage" has a certain ironic ring to it. As if the University President really thinks that in a hundred years, he will be remembered for a parking garage. It's the sort of thing that if I were a student there and immersed in this issue when seeing that sign, I would probably laugh and think "what a fool Zaccari is."
When a communication has several plausible innocent meanings, it hardly presents the threat of a clear and present danger just because someone chose to take it out of context and give it the threatening meaning. Based on TFA, Zaccari pointed to a couple things from an online profile (one of which was a mere advertisement placed there by Facebook). Who among us could not be characterized in an unfair way similarly to the way this student was characterized?
The entire world as your development group is much more powerful over the long haul than a bunch of guys on the payroll in Cupertino or in Redmond.
It doesn't matter whether you are enamored with or spiteful toward what Linux is NOW.
It's what it has the potential to become, as compared to the old development model of paying a bunch of guys in an office and keeping the guts of their creation under lock and key so that no one else is allowed to improve upon their work, ever.
Linux's strength is in it's staying power. It's not going anywhere. You can't kill it the way you can a start-up company... or even a large and powerful company.
It's still largely a hobbyist platform. (Remember, I'm talking about Linux on the desktop, not on the server.) But given a time-span long enough, Linux is bound to be a major player on the desktop (possibly even the dominant player).
The economics of Linux don't place the same value on a perfected user experience. But it does place some value on user experience. That value only goes up over time. What was the most user-friendly Linux distribution in 1996? What was the installation like back then? Now compare that with installing today's Ubuntu or SUSE or Fedora or Mandriva or almost any distribution that you randomly pick off the front page of distrowatch.com. The difference is huge, and the user experience can only continue to improve.
If Steve Jobs is the great master of the user experience, what will happen to Apple if when he quits or dies? I don't know the answer to that.
But I know what will happen to Linux if Linus Torvalds dies... Pretty much nothing. Linux is analogous to the internet. It keeps getting bigger and better, and it has no weak link. The same cannot be said for Apple or Microsoft.
"A 26-year-old college student on federal disability, Whitaker doesn't fit most people's image of a sex offender. But, because of an ill-considered 10th-grade blowjob -- resulting in her conviction for an act that's no longer crime in Georgia -- she has spent nearly a decade on Georgia's sex-offender registry."
The sex offender registry laws are an absurdity. It's essentially a life sentence that applies to a huge swath of activity that we deem "deviant", not just child molesters.
In Georgia, the laws are so badly written, that no lawyer can really tell you what's required of an offender.
For example, I had a homeless client (registered sex offender) charged with failure to update his address after he had "moved". But the law says "homeless does not constitute an address." So does that mean that there is no address change and that he has committed no crime? (the position we took) Or does it mean that it's illegal to be homeless?
The court saw that ours was a plausible interpretation of the statute and dismissed the case. But the opinion of most lawyers in this state is that the sex offender law makes it illegal for a registered sex offender to be homeless.
Yes, they use video games to train. Yes, they use video games to market to recruits. Yes, they are in the business of war.
Somehow adding video games to the mix makes it more unholy than it already was?
Whatever. Will someone just shoot this guy already?
I've tried using mutt, but there seems to be a big learning curve before a mere mortal can use it. Pine was self-explanatory from the start, with on-screen menus that made everything easy. On the other hand, Pine ran on a university server that was already configured for my account. So my memory may be colored by the fact that I didn't have to set up Postfix or create mail directories, which may have been necessary had I run Pine on my own computer. APC: What software do you use everyday? Your browser, desktop (if any), email client and so on?
LT: Well, ignoring the actual development stuff (make, compiler, editor etc), it ends up being mostly just xterms and "alpine" (the newer version of the venerable old "pine" email reader. Strictly text-based, thank you very much).
"Circuit City employees discovered the child pornography while perusing Kenneth Sodomsky's hard drive for files to test the burner"
That's right your Honor, we were just looking for some jpegs and avis to test the burner with.
The ones that have flesh-colored icons work are best for testing burners.
It flies in the face of reality, but the NCAA has been held repeatedly to be a non-governmental actor. Meaning that the Bill of Rights does not apply to it.
This, in spite of the fact that most of the member schools are public universities.
It's targeted at people with press credentials. If you have press credentials, you probably aren't sitting in the stands. You are probably in the press area. And since you have applied for and received these credentials, they know who you are.
How would they detect it? By checking your blog probably.
Can they stop Joe Everybody from doing it? As a practical matter, probably not. And they probably aren't too worried about Joe Everybody (at least not yet). As for the legal issues, I don't see a problem with it. It's their game, and they set the rules. If you break the rules, they kick you out.
So they lock down these files with DRM. Then DVD-Jon (or someone else) comes up with a DRM-stripping program for the files.
Then people can re-encode the files to their format of choice. But by then, most consumers have said "fuck it" and decided to just download their format of choice directly from p2p or usenet because it's easier and simpler than paying Apple and still violating the DMCA just so the music they paid for will work on the audio player they own.
Oh wait, that's already the status quo... Never mind.
What exactly has changed since 1988 that should make this law different?
If the law says that this information must be kept private, the internet and computers don't make it any less private.
Rather, the newfound popularity of the internet and computers should make privacy even more important, because once information is released, it spreads far more quickly and easily.
So what evidence did you provide?
You can't expect the judge to know all about email headers and what Slashdot is. She's just a judge. Computers are not her business. You have to explain how it works and why she should find that it is a "bulk email".
Judging by how you wrote the article, I'm going to guess that you didn't give a full explanation to the judge. And I doubt that you explained your background and expertise in computers (assuming that you have some) so she could have an adequate basis to determine that you know what you're talking about.
Whenever you sue someone, you have the burden to prove each and every element of your claim. It sounds to me like you didn't even attempt to meet that burden. And now you blame the judge for not knowing as much as you do about computers.
Typical nerd mentality, I suppose.
It is perfectly logical to be sell your individual right to vote for a large sum of money. One individual's right to vote is worth little other than the warm feeling one gets for taking part in the process. One person's vote is very unlikely to determine the winner of an important election.
What's more valuable is the public's right to vote. I might be willing to sell my own vote, but if everybody sold their right to vote, we would no longer have a representative democracy and tyranny would surely be around the corner.
I would gladly sell my right to vote if a proper sum were offered. But I would strongly oppose allowing anyone else to do the same.
To be precise, I suppose I meant to refer to "pandering" rather than prostitution.
Some would say that prostitution is a basic human urge for females... but that's not the meaning I intended.