Actually, no they couldn't. Not unless you think gag orders are actually enforceable. Just because someone has a contract doesn't mean you can stop them from talking about how much they dislike it. "Gag orders" are enforceable, but that's a completely different subject and context that is not relevant here.
If they really wanted to stop Reznor, they would threaten him with a lawsuit. There are a number of legal theories they could go after him with. Breach of Agency, Breach of Contract, Tortious Interference... and probably others.
Suffice it to say, when you have a contract which basically puts you in a joint venture with another party to sell a product, you aren't supposed to go around encouraging people to "steal*" that product.
* - "Steal" is Reznor's choice of words, not mine.
So Trent acts out his persona and the bigwigs at Universal do their thing and pretend to be totally P.O.ed about it. If they really wanted to stop him, they could.
Meanwhile, the story gets out and more people hear what a rebel Trent Reznor and NiN is. More people download the music... and at the same time, more people go to the record store and buy the over-priced CDs.
It reminds one of the way Microsoft pretends to hate piracy, but knows full well that the more people pirate Windows, the more people buy it. The big labels must be realizing that the more people pirate their music, the more people will buy it.
I've gone ahead and created a working draft of the new OpenBSD license for Theo. As a Linux user, I am donating my legal expertise as a way of "giving back" to BSD for all of the contributions it has made to Linux.
Copyright (c) CCYY YOUR NAME HERE
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies, and provided that no derivative works may be licensed under any version of the GPL, because it is evil. Relicensing derivative works under a proprietary license is permitted and encouraged because someday the companies that use this code may throw us a bone. Stay back dirty GPL hippies!
I see you're a lawyer, but maybe you're busy and missed this one (scroll down to the list of states with these laws and note the state this story occurred in). I know it's only the Sixth Circuit, but in this day and age I wouldn't treat it as an anomaly. I have already responded to someone else who cited Hiibel. There is a more detailed post by me further down that branch of this thread.
I don't know what you mean by "it's only the Sixth Circuit." It's a U.S. Supreme Court case. It is the law in all of the United States.
As long as the relationship STAYS online, it's fine... But meeting the person in real life can be a disaster. If I was that terrified of disasters, I would not have travelled 600 miles to meet a woman that I met online.
I would not have enjoyed 5 years of blissful marriage with her (so far).
And I would not now have a beautiful 6-month-old baby boy with her.
Try jumping in the water every once in a while. If you dip your toe first, you can be reasonably sure it won't burn you.
"except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer's judicial capacity"
There's a reason why bullshit charges are always filed when a bogus arrest is made, and it isn't just because they wanted to be an ass. Police officers are not judicial officers. "Judicial officers" refers to judges, prosecutors, public defenders, bailiffs, clerks... people who work for a court. Hence the term "judicial" and not "executive."
So in this case, where they guy verbally identified himself but refused to provide his DL, are you saying that Terry wouldn't have even required him to verbally identify himself if he had chosen not to? To be clear, Terry doesn't actually require the citizen to do anything. It allows an officer to make a limited detention, a stop and frisk. It is the state statute that places a requirement on the citizen. The question is whether the statute is constitutional and whether the officer's actions were constitutional.
Hiibel, which the grandparent links to, occurs in the context of a Terry stop. A Terry stop bears the requirement of reasonable articulable grounds of suspicion (RAGS). If there are no RAGS, it isn't a Terry stop. If you read the court's opinion in Hiibel, the entire case is based on the assumption that this is happening as part of a Terry stop. The court explicitly stated, "there is no question that the initial stop was based on reasonable suspicion, satisfying the Fourth Amendment requirements..."
If an officer does not at least have a reasonable suspicion, he cannot detain you in any way, shape or form, and that would include requiring you to answer any questions at all. In Hiibel, the Court simply held that having a reasonable suspicion allows the cops to ask you your name and require you to answer. It's an addition to the limited stop and frisk that Terry allows. But it does not mean that they can arrest you for refusing to answer when they have no reasonable suspicion.
The problem for the citizen in this situation is that you may not know whether the officer has a reasonable suspicion or not. His RAGS may come from something that you did not think significant or even something you are not aware of. So it's not necessarily a good idea to refuse to identify yourself just because you don't think you did anything wrong.
Want that to change, then you had better get you and a lot other angry people in the town hall meetings every time calling for local laws that allow citizens to personally SUE police officers when they are in the wrong.
You do not need a local law for that. There is already a federal law allowing it.
Most states have a "shopkeeper's privilege," which gives employees of retail stores the right to detain you for a reasonable time if they have reason to believe you are shoplifting.
That is probably what they relied on in your case. You came up to the counter with a product that wasn't marked as a return. It wasn't your fault, but that is what they would point to to justify their actions.
With this case (at least according to the guy who got arrested), there was no reason to suspect that he was shoplifting before they tried to detain him.
On the other hand, they may have had reason to suspect him, but he simply was not aware of it.
So if the cop suspected him of theft, can't he ask for identification? I think he can sue the hell out of the sore, but not so sure about the cop.
It's an objective standard, called "reasonable articulable grounds to suspect." The suspicion has to be articulable. The cop has to be able to point to the reasons for his suspicion.
He can sue the officer (or any state actor who violates his civil rights) under 42 USC 1983, which provides a cause of action against a state actor who violates your civil rights. However, the cop may have a good faith defense if he was following a state statute which was unconstitutional but had not already been held unconstitutional by a court.
You might not be up on current law, but states can require you to provide your identity to a LEO under certain circumstances.
Hiibel does not overturn Terry's requirement of reasonable suspicion.
"Petitioner's concerns are met by the requirement that a Terry stop must be justified at its inception and 'reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified' the initial stop. 392 U. S., at 20. Under these principles, an officer may not arrest a suspect for failure to identify himself if the request for identification is not reasonably related to the circumstances justifying the stop."
Thus, if the detention is not justified by reasonable articulable grounds of suspicion (the standard outlined in Terry), then the demand to identify cannot be charged as a crime. That remains the current state of the law.
It isn't as long as you have the right to refuse and are free to walk away. Cops can ask you anything they want, but that does not necessarily constitute a seizure for 4th Amendment purposes.
In this case, the cop arrested the guy when he refused to provide ID. Obviously he was not free to refuse.
This is supposed to be Cop Law 101 for these guys. Under the seminal U.S. Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio, cops can ask you whatever they want, but they cannot force you to answer or to cooperate unless they have reasonable articulable grounds to suspect that you have committed or are about to commit a crime.
The Circuit City employee was not accusing this fellow of stealing anything. He was simply under the mistaken impression that he could force a customer to comply with a search. What the cop did was an unreasonable seizure, an illegal arrest. What the employee did was false imprisonment. It doesn't matter what the Ohio legislature says about having to show your ID when a cop asks. A legislature cannot override the Federal Constitution. Yes, both the cop, the store employee and the store could be liable.
I think the guy should sue everyone involved. It has come to be a serious annoyance that every store thinks they can detain you because you had the gall to purchase something from them. One way to educate people is to have a nice fat lawsuit. If Circuit City wants to avoid all the bad publicity this would generate, they can settle for a nice fat sum.
The FSF will only work to enforce the GPL if the GPL code in question is signed over to the FSF. While I can understand that legal logic, I have a hard time with the concept of creating something, keeping a copyright in force, and then signing the copyright away for no benefit to myself. The only benefit would be that the FSF would then fight when someone uses it in an "unauthorized" manner.
So hire your own lawyer and keep that gigantic statutory damages award for yourself. Of course, there is a risk that the defendant will go out of business or that you will lose, and then you get to pay your lawyer out of your own pocket instead of letting FSF foot the bill for you.
If I'm not going to hold my own copyright, why not just specifically disavow copyright and let it enrich everybody via the public domain?
Because the public domain does not preserve it as open source. If you don't care about that, then by all means give it away to people who will make it proprietary and give you none of the profits from the sale of their now closed source program that used to be yours. Not sure why you would be ok with that, but that's your prerogative.
This is the root of my problem with GNU in general: why show everybody how you achieved and developed a certain technological capability, without letting people actually use that method? If you only want certain people to be able to use that method, then only show those certain people how it's done. I think it's just a bit petty to show the code but not authorize its use.
You must have never read the GPL. It allows whatever use you like and prohibits none. You can use GPLed code to build bombs, torture small animals or manufacture robotic sex slaves if you like. The only restrictions come into play when you redistribute the code (or a derivative work) to someone else.
The "certain people" that you refer to is anyone who complies with the license. You are trying to make it sound like the GPL is discriminatory. There is no basis for that at all.
The "unauthorized" user can't steal it because you will always have it. The "unauthorized" user can extend it and keep those extensions hidden, but I fail to see how that really hurts me: I can extend my copy too. If I give an ice cream cone to my brother, I can't dictate to him how he eats it.
That's nice, but coding is hard work. You may give someone a quarter or an ice cream, but are you going to give them the product of years of man hours with no strings attached? Sometimes maybe as charity. But the world doesn't turn on charity, it turns on markets, interactions between people, negotiated terms by which the meaning of "fair" is agreed upon in advance. Charity is all well and good, but the GPL is not about charity. It is about fairness between people who are sharing the source of their livelihood, their labor.
The GPL allows you to share resources among many people while preventing any one person from unfairly taking advantage of your generosity. If you would prefer to give your work away absolutely free, with no restrictions, you can. If you would prefer to keep your work secret and keep it to yourself (even if you use someone else's GPLed code), you can. But if you want to leverage the skills and manpower of people all over the world under fair terms for a common goal, then the GPL can be a great tool for accomplishing that goal.
If you want true unlimited access, then get a T1 in, and pay for it like everyone else who wants to saturate his connection 24/7.
Bollocks. Nobody said anything about saturating a connection 24/7. This story is about people making normal use of their broadband connection. Watching TV shows and video on YouTube are common online activities. If you pay for a fast connection, it's because you are going to use it for these activities.
Attempts have been made by players in the industry to form a united front against the BBC by asking the Internet Service Providers' Association to lead the campaign on the iPlayer issue.
It's not a united front against the BBC, although I'm sure they'd like to portray it that way.
It's a united front against their users who want to pay for "unlimited access" and actually receive same.
If that is what most of the people in our society want, then yes.
Democracy can be such a bitch sometimes.
It's not as simple as a majority vote. In the USA, at least, the government cannot take property for public use without just compensation. This is a good thing, because otherwise the government could raze your house to build a road and give you nothing. If the government were to abolish existing copyrights, it would have to pay huge sums of money to the individuals and companies that own them.
You could simply stop creating new ones and wait until all of the existing ones expired (about a century).
Or you could pass a Constitutional amendment abolishing copyright, or giving Congress the power to do so.
You can expect music to suck even more than it already does. All of those "cool" bands that you thought would never "sell out" will start singing about deodorant and soft drink brands. Television shows will begin to look like that scene in the Truman Show, where Truman's wife suddenly holds up a household product and talks about how great it is.
Unlike the Napster case, Youtube has revenue sources (and Google can invest the additional funds needed to keep it afloat).
The studios, quite rightfully see a source of revenue there. It's not just a bunch of cheap bastards sharing amongst themselves. It's a multibillion dollar company making money off of THEIR content.
Should copyright just be abolished because we want free access to tv shows and movie clips?
Laws passed by Congress under the authority of the Constitution ALWAYS override state laws. See Article 6, Paragraph 2 of the Constitution of the United States, "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding."
The Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, Section 1 applies the Bill of Rights to the States (well, most of them anyway). Among those rights which are applied to the States via 14th Amendment Due Process is the Freedom of the Press. (You would think that these rights would flow from the "Privileges and Immunities" Clause of the 14th instead. For reasons not worth going into here, the Supreme Court has held that they flow from the Due Process clause.)
Section 5 of the 14th Amendment authorizes Congress to pass legislation enforcing the 14th Amendment. That is where Congress gets authority for this legislation.
The so-called "Federal minimum drinking age" is simply a funding limitation. States which do not set a minimum drinking age determined by Congress will not be given Federal highway funds. Congress is allowed to do that, because it is not setting the drinking age, it is simply determining how to allocate funds. The Constitution gives Congress authority to allocate funds.
Of course, this is a loophole for Congress to increase Federal power over all aspects of our lives. The Federal government taxes you a whole lot, leaving less money for the states to take, and then it uses your money to bribe/extort your state legislature into passing laws that it approves of. I don't believe this was ever the intent of the Founders, but it is the world we live in now.
Slashdot Mirror
If they really wanted to stop Reznor, they would threaten him with a lawsuit. There are a number of legal theories they could go after him with. Breach of Agency, Breach of Contract, Tortious Interference... and probably others.
Suffice it to say, when you have a contract which basically puts you in a joint venture with another party to sell a product, you aren't supposed to go around encouraging people to "steal*" that product.
* - "Steal" is Reznor's choice of words, not mine.
So Trent acts out his persona and the bigwigs at Universal do their thing and pretend to be totally P.O.ed about it. If they really wanted to stop him, they could.
Meanwhile, the story gets out and more people hear what a rebel Trent Reznor and NiN is. More people download the music... and at the same time, more people go to the record store and buy the over-priced CDs.
It reminds one of the way Microsoft pretends to hate piracy, but knows full well that the more people pirate Windows, the more people buy it. The big labels must be realizing that the more people pirate their music, the more people will buy it.
Culture is somewhat analogous to platform.
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies, and provided that no derivative works may be licensed under any version of the GPL, because it is evil. Relicensing derivative works under a proprietary license is permitted and encouraged because someday the companies that use this code may throw us a bone. Stay back dirty GPL hippies!
I don't know what you mean by "it's only the Sixth Circuit." It's a U.S. Supreme Court case. It is the law in all of the United States.
I would not have enjoyed 5 years of blissful marriage with her (so far).
And I would not now have a beautiful 6-month-old baby boy with her.
Try jumping in the water every once in a while. If you dip your toe first, you can be reasonably sure it won't burn you.
Victory is meaningless.
I win!!!
Sweet.
Come on Buddhists!
Fight! Fight! Fight!
"except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer's judicial capacity"
There's a reason why bullshit charges are always filed when a bogus arrest is made, and it isn't just because they wanted to be an ass. Police officers are not judicial officers. "Judicial officers" refers to judges, prosecutors, public defenders, bailiffs, clerks... people who work for a court. Hence the term "judicial" and not "executive."
Assuming they had no reason to believe he had stolen anything, then yes, that too would be a 4th Amendment violation.
Would you like to add some sort of point to your nonsensical trolling?
There is a large body of caselaw interpreting Terry v. Ohio. That's the wonderful thing about the law. It keeps on growing.
If you think you know all about Terry v. Ohio just because you've skimmed the case, you are sorely mistaken.
Hiibel, which the grandparent links to, occurs in the context of a Terry stop. A Terry stop bears the requirement of reasonable articulable grounds of suspicion (RAGS). If there are no RAGS, it isn't a Terry stop. If you read the court's opinion in Hiibel, the entire case is based on the assumption that this is happening as part of a Terry stop. The court explicitly stated, "there is no question that the initial stop was based on reasonable suspicion, satisfying the Fourth Amendment requirements..."
If an officer does not at least have a reasonable suspicion, he cannot detain you in any way, shape or form, and that would include requiring you to answer any questions at all. In Hiibel, the Court simply held that having a reasonable suspicion allows the cops to ask you your name and require you to answer. It's an addition to the limited stop and frisk that Terry allows. But it does not mean that they can arrest you for refusing to answer when they have no reasonable suspicion.
The problem for the citizen in this situation is that you may not know whether the officer has a reasonable suspicion or not. His RAGS may come from something that you did not think significant or even something you are not aware of. So it's not necessarily a good idea to refuse to identify yourself just because you don't think you did anything wrong.
Want that to change, then you had better get you and a lot other angry people in the town hall meetings every time calling for local laws that allow citizens to personally SUE police officers when they are in the wrong.
You do not need a local law for that. There is already a federal law allowing it.
Most states have a "shopkeeper's privilege," which gives employees of retail stores the right to detain you for a reasonable time if they have reason to believe you are shoplifting.
That is probably what they relied on in your case. You came up to the counter with a product that wasn't marked as a return. It wasn't your fault, but that is what they would point to to justify their actions.
With this case (at least according to the guy who got arrested), there was no reason to suspect that he was shoplifting before they tried to detain him.
On the other hand, they may have had reason to suspect him, but he simply was not aware of it.
So if the cop suspected him of theft, can't he ask for identification? I think he can sue the hell out of the sore, but not so sure about the cop.
It's an objective standard, called "reasonable articulable grounds to suspect." The suspicion has to be articulable. The cop has to be able to point to the reasons for his suspicion.
He can sue the officer (or any state actor who violates his civil rights) under 42 USC 1983, which provides a cause of action against a state actor who violates your civil rights. However, the cop may have a good faith defense if he was following a state statute which was unconstitutional but had not already been held unconstitutional by a court.
You might not be up on current law, but states can require you to provide your identity to a LEO under certain circumstances.
Hiibel does not overturn Terry's requirement of reasonable suspicion.
"Petitioner's concerns are met by the requirement that a Terry stop must be justified at its inception and 'reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified' the initial stop. 392 U. S., at 20. Under these principles, an officer may not arrest a suspect for failure to identify himself if the request for identification is not reasonably related to the circumstances justifying the stop."
Thus, if the detention is not justified by reasonable articulable grounds of suspicion (the standard outlined in Terry), then the demand to identify cannot be charged as a crime. That remains the current state of the law.
Asking for ID does not constitute a Terry stop.
It isn't as long as you have the right to refuse and are free to walk away. Cops can ask you anything they want, but that does not necessarily constitute a seizure for 4th Amendment purposes.
In this case, the cop arrested the guy when he refused to provide ID. Obviously he was not free to refuse.
This is supposed to be Cop Law 101 for these guys. Under the seminal U.S. Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio, cops can ask you whatever they want, but they cannot force you to answer or to cooperate unless they have reasonable articulable grounds to suspect that you have committed or are about to commit a crime.
The Circuit City employee was not accusing this fellow of stealing anything. He was simply under the mistaken impression that he could force a customer to comply with a search. What the cop did was an unreasonable seizure, an illegal arrest. What the employee did was false imprisonment. It doesn't matter what the Ohio legislature says about having to show your ID when a cop asks. A legislature cannot override the Federal Constitution. Yes, both the cop, the store employee and the store could be liable.
I think the guy should sue everyone involved. It has come to be a serious annoyance that every store thinks they can detain you because you had the gall to purchase something from them. One way to educate people is to have a nice fat lawsuit. If Circuit City wants to avoid all the bad publicity this would generate, they can settle for a nice fat sum.
The FSF will only work to enforce the GPL if the GPL code in question is signed over to the FSF. While I can understand that legal logic, I have a hard time with the concept of creating something, keeping a copyright in force, and then signing the copyright away for no benefit to myself. The only benefit would be that the FSF would then fight when someone uses it in an "unauthorized" manner.
So hire your own lawyer and keep that gigantic statutory damages award for yourself. Of course, there is a risk that the defendant will go out of business or that you will lose, and then you get to pay your lawyer out of your own pocket instead of letting FSF foot the bill for you.
If I'm not going to hold my own copyright, why not just specifically disavow copyright and let it enrich everybody via the public domain?
Because the public domain does not preserve it as open source. If you don't care about that, then by all means give it away to people who will make it proprietary and give you none of the profits from the sale of their now closed source program that used to be yours. Not sure why you would be ok with that, but that's your prerogative.
This is the root of my problem with GNU in general: why show everybody how you achieved and developed a certain technological capability, without letting people actually use that method? If you only want certain people to be able to use that method, then only show those certain people how it's done. I think it's just a bit petty to show the code but not authorize its use.
You must have never read the GPL. It allows whatever use you like and prohibits none. You can use GPLed code to build bombs, torture small animals or manufacture robotic sex slaves if you like. The only restrictions come into play when you redistribute the code (or a derivative work) to someone else.
The "certain people" that you refer to is anyone who complies with the license. You are trying to make it sound like the GPL is discriminatory. There is no basis for that at all.
The "unauthorized" user can't steal it because you will always have it. The "unauthorized" user can extend it and keep those extensions hidden, but I fail to see how that really hurts me: I can extend my copy too. If I give an ice cream cone to my brother, I can't dictate to him how he eats it.
That's nice, but coding is hard work. You may give someone a quarter or an ice cream, but are you going to give them the product of years of man hours with no strings attached? Sometimes maybe as charity. But the world doesn't turn on charity, it turns on markets, interactions between people, negotiated terms by which the meaning of "fair" is agreed upon in advance. Charity is all well and good, but the GPL is not about charity. It is about fairness between people who are sharing the source of their livelihood, their labor.
The GPL allows you to share resources among many people while preventing any one person from unfairly taking advantage of your generosity. If you would prefer to give your work away absolutely free, with no restrictions, you can. If you would prefer to keep your work secret and keep it to yourself (even if you use someone else's GPLed code), you can. But if you want to leverage the skills and manpower of people all over the world under fair terms for a common goal, then the GPL can be a great tool for accomplishing that goal.
There are some newer vehicles that the ONLY key is a fob that you never need to even take out of your pocket / purse.
The ONLY key? What do you do when that little battery runs out and you are stuck in the middle of nowhere? Sounds like a really bad idea.
I have a 2006 Honda Civic. It came with a key.
After following me around the mall for an hour with this little device, they would run the software, get into my Honda Civic, and then...
Hotwire it.
How easy is that? I think they'd just carjack someone before going through the trouble.
If you want true unlimited access, then get a T1 in, and pay for it like everyone else who wants to saturate his connection 24/7.
Bollocks. Nobody said anything about saturating a connection 24/7. This story is about people making normal use of their broadband connection. Watching TV shows and video on YouTube are common online activities. If you pay for a fast connection, it's because you are going to use it for these activities.
Attempts have been made by players in the industry to form a united front against the BBC by asking the Internet Service Providers' Association to lead the campaign on the iPlayer issue.
It's not a united front against the BBC, although I'm sure they'd like to portray it that way.
It's a united front against their users who want to pay for "unlimited access" and actually receive same.
If that is what most of the people in our society want, then yes.
Democracy can be such a bitch sometimes.
It's not as simple as a majority vote. In the USA, at least, the government cannot take property for public use without just compensation. This is a good thing, because otherwise the government could raze your house to build a road and give you nothing. If the government were to abolish existing copyrights, it would have to pay huge sums of money to the individuals and companies that own them.
You could simply stop creating new ones and wait until all of the existing ones expired (about a century).
Or you could pass a Constitutional amendment abolishing copyright, or giving Congress the power to do so.
You can expect music to suck even more than it already does. All of those "cool" bands that you thought would never "sell out" will start singing about deodorant and soft drink brands. Television shows will begin to look like that scene in the Truman Show, where Truman's wife suddenly holds up a household product and talks about how great it is.
So why is Hollywood shooting a remake?
Unlike the Napster case, Youtube has revenue sources (and Google can invest the additional funds needed to keep it afloat).
The studios, quite rightfully see a source of revenue there. It's not just a bunch of cheap bastards sharing amongst themselves. It's a multibillion dollar company making money off of THEIR content.
Should copyright just be abolished because we want free access to tv shows and movie clips?
Laws passed by Congress under the authority of the Constitution ALWAYS override state laws. See Article 6, Paragraph 2 of the Constitution of the United States, "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding."
The Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, Section 1 applies the Bill of Rights to the States (well, most of them anyway). Among those rights which are applied to the States via 14th Amendment Due Process is the Freedom of the Press. (You would think that these rights would flow from the "Privileges and Immunities" Clause of the 14th instead. For reasons not worth going into here, the Supreme Court has held that they flow from the Due Process clause.)
Section 5 of the 14th Amendment authorizes Congress to pass legislation enforcing the 14th Amendment. That is where Congress gets authority for this legislation.
The so-called "Federal minimum drinking age" is simply a funding limitation. States which do not set a minimum drinking age determined by Congress will not be given Federal highway funds. Congress is allowed to do that, because it is not setting the drinking age, it is simply determining how to allocate funds. The Constitution gives Congress authority to allocate funds.
Of course, this is a loophole for Congress to increase Federal power over all aspects of our lives. The Federal government taxes you a whole lot, leaving less money for the states to take, and then it uses your money to bribe/extort your state legislature into passing laws that it approves of. I don't believe this was ever the intent of the Founders, but it is the world we live in now.