Putting this into context: the authors of the U.S. constitution were concerned with wrongfully disarming the populace under the subjegation of the government. Thirteen years before, the populace had succeeded in a revolution against the King of England -- and the reason they had won was precisely because they had guns equal to those possessed by the government of the time. The King of the time had tried to make that illegal. The "right to bear arms" is a right recognized in the constitution of the people to retain the power of revolution against an unjust government. "Arms" are those devices needed for revolution, and those arms include guns.
In all of the fervor over the kid's possession of a shotgun, no one seems to note that this kid had that machete and several molotov cocktails.
Citizens of Colorado: be GRATEFUL this kid had a shotgun. If he wasn't able to commit suicide with it, this could have been far, far uglier. Can you imagine what the media would have made over this if he'd walked into a classroom full of first graders and hacked away for the 20 minutes it took for the police to arrive?
The problem is NOT that this kid was able to buy a gun. The problem is this kid was an undetected PSYCHOPATH.
Maybe so, but do you think Joe user is going to sue the big boys for cutting off his service? And if Joe wins, what do you think the damages will be? Restoration of service and some lawyer's fees? And what IP lawyer do you think will take on such a case?
Everyone seems to be overlooking the fact that we're talking about a product here that's small enough to be dropped in a briefcase, or shipped in a small box. This will only increase the demand for the product across the border. If I'm a consumer and I really want one of these, all I have to do is take a quick trip across the border, or find someone over there who will sell and ship me one. Do you think Apple's going to pursue damages for that guy, when all they'd recover is a small fraction of the price of one product?
If that doesn't do it, consider this: If the infringing feature is implemented in software, then all Samsung has to do is release a new rev. of their OS without the feature, and they're back. Don't you think that Samsung's management has planned out a strategy for this a long, long time ago?
Geez, people. You people would make a great audience for a Godzilla movie!
There are such rights in the U.S., but to copy a database, you must first have access to it. When was GeoCoder given access to the Canadian Post files? As the GeoCoder DB is an independent, crowdsourced work, the only claim the Canadian Post could have is in its contents.
I'd say that postal codes aren't "works of authorship" entitled to copyright protection. It looks like the canadian lawyer is making a similar argument from paragraph 23 on.
So the prosecutor got the wrong criminal charge. Am I supposed to be impressed?
Goldman Sachs can still go after him and ruin his life for theft of trade secrets, copyright infringement, violations of his employee agreement, and a host of other things. That will be before another judge in civil court, folks, with different laws entirely.
Maybe "slavery" was on the way out, but racial injustice certainly wasn't.
This is a part of the 14th amendment: "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws". Without the civil war the states could march in and take whatever they wanted from lesser-privileged classes, and it was all legally legitimate.
Hundreds of thousands died in the Civil War, but far more future lives would have been ruined without the conflict!
"We can influence any pump within a 300ft [91m] range," Mr Jack told the BBC. "We can make that pump dispense its entire 300 unit reservoir of insulin and we can do that without requiring its ID number."
So you're telling me that a bad actor could affix a computer with malicious software to a car, and drive it to the parking lot of a hospital that refills these insulin pumps, and kill lots of people?
And how would the police detect such a thing, let alone find who was responsible? A terrorist would be long gone before law enforcement had the first clue.
If I were the maker of one of these wireless medical devices, I'd be tempted to tell my users to wrap them in foil!
This is the MPAA you're quoting, after all. I recognize your right to a fair use of their work of authorship, but it's doubtful their lawyers would with the positions they take...
A C&D letter might be in your future...
..under this law. What legislator is going to stand up and ask for this $ limit to be raised? That only helps the boys sitting in the jail cell, and they don't vote...
Public defenders represent far too many clients to do a good job for all of them. They've gotta pick and choose which cases they'll pay time and attention to, and if yours is a piddly misdemeanor case that won't advance his reputation, don't expect him to do as well for you as a paid one.
The solution to this is trivial. If I'm a counterfeiter and I don't want to be traced, then I buy a printer with cash and throw it away after a short time. The manufacturers set the price of ink/toner refills so high, the counterfeiter would logically do this at the time the printer ran out. Oh, and the cost to the counterfeiter is 0 if they print the cash to buy successive printers. So long as they don't buy a printer twice from the same store and don't reveal their IDs at the time of purchase (say, for a "warranty"), I don't see how they're going to get caught.
Have you noticed that the manufacturers are printing the serial number on the box these days, and that stores scan them at the time of purchase? I wonder why...
This is stupid as a matter of policy. If I'm a criminal, and I want to keep my data a secret, then I just hide it within some other piece of legitimate data. All I have to do is encode my data within the low bits of a video or an audio file, and I'm there. To the police, it looks like an ordinary media file (with perhaps a little noise.)
I predict that someone will write a driver within 6 months that mounts that noisy porno film as a filesystem.
When it comes to technology, judges might as well be wearing baby bonnets and sucking their thumbs.
Generally, every person upon whom police action is taken has a right to know the authority under which that action is taken. If every person asked for proof showing the name of the "officer", his employer, and asked for the statute under which the action was being taken, there would be a lot less silliness by these people and much less frequent searches. Look it up in the laws where you live, and know what you have a right to demand of these people.
Park the car where there will be witnesses. Then, lock the car with the valuables inside. Thieves won't want to break into a vehicle where they'll be seen and it will be obvious what they're doing.
Park the car on the busiest street you can find. If it's going to be there overnight, don't leave the valuables inside.
In electricity, that which allows current to flow easily (as the material does from the article) has a name... it's called a "conductor."
Maybe these batteries can be charged lots of times, but I'll bet they leak like sieves. I'll bet the won't hold a charge for very long.
There are several problems with meeting that standard, but mainly it is that we pay the Patent Office practically nothing to do a search (less than $1,000). We put a patent examiner into a body of prior art that uses so many terms that it's impossible to do one quickly in most cases. For bicycles, we have one term for a "handlebar". For software, every developer with their "new" product has to come up with interesting terminology or it won't be accepted. Many products in the software field are "flashes in the pan": their companies went belly-up within a year or two and whatever documentation existed on them ain't easy to find.
If the Patent Office were given the resources to do a proper search, the software patents that would be issued would cover narrow features that would have so many work-arounds that the true value of most inventions (small) would be realized.
I mean, attach the word "infringement" to any story, and the marketing people will go nuts!
Facebook's lawyers will quickly figure out whether there is any merit to the case, and either change their word or kill Timelines' TM registration.
My guess is that Timelines.com knows they're dead meat already, and they're just trying to get a little more VC money before the axe falls.
If these guys have come up with something that will scale up to megawatt powers, this could spell the end of overhead power lines. It could power anything line-of-sight, including satellites. It could also transmit solar power harvested from space to the earth.
Laser light can be focused tightly onto a target, unlike microwaves or radio-based radiation. This could be very efficient...
There is always the fair use doctrine. Perhaps the Costco lawyers forgot about that one.
The fair use doctrine allows the owner certain uses of the copyrighted product. It seems to me that a sale of a product where the only copyrights are in an applied logo is a fair use.
I think that is the right approach, but perhaps the wrong case.
The copyright law says, more or less, that you have a property right in the works that you author. If you have a right, and the government nullifies that, then they have done a "taking".
In this case, if I understand correctly, all the party did was copy works that already existed. Those were not works of authorship, because there was no contribution to the work by the party. If another party took something out of the public domain in the same timeframe, and modified it in some way, then it would be a work of authorship. Then the takings clause would apply.
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Putting this into context: the authors of the U.S. constitution were concerned with wrongfully disarming the populace under the subjegation of the government. Thirteen years before, the populace had succeeded in a revolution against the King of England -- and the reason they had won was precisely because they had guns equal to those possessed by the government of the time. The King of the time had tried to make that illegal. The "right to bear arms" is a right recognized in the constitution of the people to retain the power of revolution against an unjust government. "Arms" are those devices needed for revolution, and those arms include guns.
In all of the fervor over the kid's possession of a shotgun, no one seems to note that this kid had that machete and several molotov cocktails.
Citizens of Colorado: be GRATEFUL this kid had a shotgun. If he wasn't able to commit suicide with it, this could have been far, far uglier. Can you imagine what the media would have made over this if he'd walked into a classroom full of first graders and hacked away for the 20 minutes it took for the police to arrive?
The problem is NOT that this kid was able to buy a gun. The problem is this kid was an undetected PSYCHOPATH.
Maybe so, but do you think Joe user is going to sue the big boys for cutting off his service? And if Joe wins, what do you think the damages will be? Restoration of service and some lawyer's fees? And what IP lawyer do you think will take on such a case?
Told you!
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/07/03/ban-on-galaxy-nexus-u-s-sales-upheld-software-patch-to-circumvent-forthcoming/
Everyone seems to be overlooking the fact that we're talking about a product here that's small enough to be dropped in a briefcase, or shipped in a small box. This will only increase the demand for the product across the border. If I'm a consumer and I really want one of these, all I have to do is take a quick trip across the border, or find someone over there who will sell and ship me one. Do you think Apple's going to pursue damages for that guy, when all they'd recover is a small fraction of the price of one product?
If that doesn't do it, consider this: If the infringing feature is implemented in software, then all Samsung has to do is release a new rev. of their OS without the feature, and they're back. Don't you think that Samsung's management has planned out a strategy for this a long, long time ago?
Geez, people. You people would make a great audience for a Godzilla movie!
A patent protects the functionality of a product. The way the blocks are manipulated in the game is functional.
Until this is heard on appeal ... there will be a multitude of authors of famous games who will be threatening the copycats under this stupid decision.
(Oh, and copyrights are worldwide ... this judge has effectively granted the author a game a world-wide patent upon it. Let the games begin!)
There are such rights in the U.S., but to copy a database, you must first have access to it. When was GeoCoder given access to the Canadian Post files? As the GeoCoder DB is an independent, crowdsourced work, the only claim the Canadian Post could have is in its contents.
I'd say that postal codes aren't "works of authorship" entitled to copyright protection. It looks like the canadian lawyer is making a similar argument from paragraph 23 on.
Oh, wait ... I am a lawyer ...
So the prosecutor got the wrong criminal charge. Am I supposed to be impressed?
Goldman Sachs can still go after him and ruin his life for theft of trade secrets, copyright infringement, violations of his employee agreement, and a host of other things. That will be before another judge in civil court, folks, with different laws entirely.
Maybe "slavery" was on the way out, but racial injustice certainly wasn't.
This is a part of the 14th amendment: "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws". Without the civil war the states could march in and take whatever they wanted from lesser-privileged classes, and it was all legally legitimate.
Hundreds of thousands died in the Civil War, but far more future lives would have been ruined without the conflict!
"We can influence any pump within a 300ft [91m] range," Mr Jack told the BBC. "We can make that pump dispense its entire 300 unit reservoir of insulin and we can do that without requiring its ID number."
So you're telling me that a bad actor could affix a computer with malicious software to a car, and drive it to the parking lot of a hospital that refills these insulin pumps, and kill lots of people?
And how would the police detect such a thing, let alone find who was responsible? A terrorist would be long gone before law enforcement had the first clue.
If I were the maker of one of these wireless medical devices, I'd be tempted to tell my users to wrap them in foil!
This is the MPAA you're quoting, after all. I recognize your right to a fair use of their work of authorship, but it's doubtful their lawyers would with the positions they take... A C&D letter might be in your future...
..under this law. What legislator is going to stand up and ask for this $ limit to be raised? That only helps the boys sitting in the jail cell, and they don't vote...
I wonder what sort of damage losing your THUMBS could do to your business... I'm rather fond of mine!
Public defenders represent far too many clients to do a good job for all of them. They've gotta pick and choose which cases they'll pay time and attention to, and if yours is a piddly misdemeanor case that won't advance his reputation, don't expect him to do as well for you as a paid one.
The solution to this is trivial. If I'm a counterfeiter and I don't want to be traced, then I buy a printer with cash and throw it away after a short time. The manufacturers set the price of ink/toner refills so high, the counterfeiter would logically do this at the time the printer ran out. Oh, and the cost to the counterfeiter is 0 if they print the cash to buy successive printers. So long as they don't buy a printer twice from the same store and don't reveal their IDs at the time of purchase (say, for a "warranty"), I don't see how they're going to get caught. Have you noticed that the manufacturers are printing the serial number on the box these days, and that stores scan them at the time of purchase? I wonder why...
This is stupid as a matter of policy. If I'm a criminal, and I want to keep my data a secret, then I just hide it within some other piece of legitimate data. All I have to do is encode my data within the low bits of a video or an audio file, and I'm there. To the police, it looks like an ordinary media file (with perhaps a little noise.) I predict that someone will write a driver within 6 months that mounts that noisy porno film as a filesystem. When it comes to technology, judges might as well be wearing baby bonnets and sucking their thumbs.
Generally, every person upon whom police action is taken has a right to know the authority under which that action is taken. If every person asked for proof showing the name of the "officer", his employer, and asked for the statute under which the action was being taken, there would be a lot less silliness by these people and much less frequent searches. Look it up in the laws where you live, and know what you have a right to demand of these people.
Park the car where there will be witnesses. Then, lock the car with the valuables inside. Thieves won't want to break into a vehicle where they'll be seen and it will be obvious what they're doing. Park the car on the busiest street you can find. If it's going to be there overnight, don't leave the valuables inside.
In electricity, that which allows current to flow easily (as the material does from the article) has a name ... it's called a "conductor."
Maybe these batteries can be charged lots of times, but I'll bet they leak like sieves. I'll bet the won't hold a charge for very long.
There are several problems with meeting that standard, but mainly it is that we pay the Patent Office practically nothing to do a search (less than $1,000). We put a patent examiner into a body of prior art that uses so many terms that it's impossible to do one quickly in most cases. For bicycles, we have one term for a "handlebar". For software, every developer with their "new" product has to come up with interesting terminology or it won't be accepted. Many products in the software field are "flashes in the pan": their companies went belly-up within a year or two and whatever documentation existed on them ain't easy to find. If the Patent Office were given the resources to do a proper search, the software patents that would be issued would cover narrow features that would have so many work-arounds that the true value of most inventions (small) would be realized.
I mean, attach the word "infringement" to any story, and the marketing people will go nuts! Facebook's lawyers will quickly figure out whether there is any merit to the case, and either change their word or kill Timelines' TM registration. My guess is that Timelines.com knows they're dead meat already, and they're just trying to get a little more VC money before the axe falls.
If these guys have come up with something that will scale up to megawatt powers, this could spell the end of overhead power lines. It could power anything line-of-sight, including satellites. It could also transmit solar power harvested from space to the earth. Laser light can be focused tightly onto a target, unlike microwaves or radio-based radiation. This could be very efficient...
There is always the fair use doctrine. Perhaps the Costco lawyers forgot about that one. The fair use doctrine allows the owner certain uses of the copyrighted product. It seems to me that a sale of a product where the only copyrights are in an applied logo is a fair use.
I think that is the right approach, but perhaps the wrong case. The copyright law says, more or less, that you have a property right in the works that you author. If you have a right, and the government nullifies that, then they have done a "taking". In this case, if I understand correctly, all the party did was copy works that already existed. Those were not works of authorship, because there was no contribution to the work by the party. If another party took something out of the public domain in the same timeframe, and modified it in some way, then it would be a work of authorship. Then the takings clause would apply.