Opening a letter that's not addressed to you is a crime. Failing to commit a crime is neither lazy or idiotic. The proper course of action is to return to sender. Can you RTS a registered letter? What if it wasn't sent by registered letter, but served in person?
“We’re still going to serve that S.O.B. personally,” Deters said of Richie. “I’m going to make that dirty, rotten, mean, vermin bastard pay. He’s a piece of dirt." Sounds to me like they never served him the first time. Given that they admit to never serving one of the two defendants listed on their complaint, I think it's pretty unlikely the served the first one cormmrectly, either. At any rate, if I got a piece of mail addressed to a person who doesn't live there, I'd return it to sender. It's a felony to open somebody else's mail. So, if thedirt.com got mail incorrectly addressed to thedirty.com and Richie, the owner of thedirty.com, they would be completely wrong in opening it at all. That's an actual crime, not civil but criminal. The lawyers also says they are planning to sue the investors in the LLC to punish them for making money off of libelous writings. I presume this was before he learned his judgment was against the wrong LLC, possibly one he never even served.
TFA mentions 50 years, about 49 years and 364 days short of your "day after". Additionally, the law is on the manufacture of goods with incorrect patent labels, not the sale, so it doesn't matter how long it was in the store. What matters is if you are still making them.
Right, but TFA is talking about expired by 50+ years, not by minutes. If, you make NEW molds and NEW designs that still are labeled with patents that are expired by decades, there's a clear intent to deceive.
That's not what they say. They are saying that they want the ability to charge more for high priority traffic. That is, packets have priority built into the header, for QoS stuff. If you want your VOIP to go through, you set your priority higher. They want to be able to charge you extra to be able to do that. It's absolutely totally and utterly unrelated to charging for access to particular sites, or prioritizing particular sites.
The egg debate is more complicated than that. Basically, many studies have shown moderate egg intake to have no effect on cholesterol levels. The "Eggs are bad" studies actually conclude that dietary cholesterol impacts blood cholesterol, and therefore that one should avoid dietary cholesterol, which is generally speaking good advice based on their data. But, these are not actually opposite things. Eggs contain cholesterol, but also contain quite a bit of unsaturated fats. Other studies show that unsaturated fats lower cholesterol levels (bad cholesterol anyway) so, taken as a whole, "dietary cholesterol bad" and "eggs not bad in moderation" are not contradictory at all. The advice to avoid cholesterol is not bad per se, but as a general rule is always prone to exceptions. Eggs are one of those eggceptions.
I hope you're not posting on Slashdot from work. Because slacking off at work is considered fraud under the "Honest Services" act, and therefore you are committing a federal felony. Enjoy your execution!;)
State Freedom of Information Acts tend to be a lot less broad than the federal one (which only applies to the federal executive branch). Using Michigan as an example, you cannot request all documents relating to a given subject. You have to identify what documents you want, and be specific. In that regard, I highly doubt that you could say "I want all of the email sent by this professor to any of these 40 other people, for the last 5 years". That's absurdly broad. You probably could request all of the documents used to support a research grant application. But, that was to the state. I would think that therefore, the state would already have those documents, so requesting then seems more like harassment. (Unless you can get away with citing but not submitting papers with your grant? That would be weird to allow in the first place...) They also request a list of all documents that have been destroyed, and documents verifying the legitimate reason for their destruction. That one is almost insulting. It's like asking somebody to please list the times they have beaten their wife, and their reasoning for those beatings. Sounds pretty accusatory.
Yeah, that sounds like exactly what happened. Especially considering that she's trying to have her marriage, in which she had 3 kids, completely erased from existence on the grounds that she is a sociopath and thus was not mentally fit to enter into a marriage. (And won)
Yeah, that's basically why I have a permenant boycott of Bioware going on. See, the extra weapons and levels for Mass Effect 2 if you buy it new, that's obnoxious. But, they put a used game salesman character onto the Citadel, who chuckles about what a killing he makes, while the starving developers go out of business. They're not content with always on DRM locking out features if you try to install your game on a second 360, they have to kick us in the balls and spit in our faces, too.
It's not just devs, either. Apparently the folks at Penny Arcade believe that buying a used game is actually worse than pirating, because with piracy you are at least not giving money to anybody, but with a used game you are both stealing AND giving money to a leech.
I asked them why selling a used game should be a crime, but lending a friend a game or a book, which they often portray in their comics, is acceptable. No answer. In publishing "both sides" they only publish comments in agreement, or comments "backing up" used games as evil, but a necessary evil for those on a budget. I also pointed them in the direction of a huge piracy mill that's stealing millions of copies of their precious anthologies. No idea their take on that, but I bet they are contacting their lawyers! Their other blazing hypocracy is that their child's play charity donates games and systems to children's wards across the country. Each child doesn't need to pay for their own copy, the developer only gets paid ONCE (a condition they decry as black market theft) and yet, more than one child gets to play. Outrageous.
Facebook launches their "Places" service that is functionally the same as "Foursquare"'s service. Facebook's logo for "Places"? A four in a square. A FOUR IN A SQUARE. And they have the balls to go after somebody for "diluting" their trademark on a generic term for a yearbook, by using the word "book". Simply incredible. I hope they lose and have to pay a legal costs and a few million in punitive damages.
Wrong. Read about trade dilution. It doesn't have to be a competing market if, as you say "everybody would know" that you're referencing somebody else's trademark. And, Ewok is a bad choice because, unlike Jedi, they do have a mark on Ewok alone, whereas they have no mark on Jedi alone, just on Jedi Knight. LucasFlim also has a mark on the word "droid" as an abbreviation of android.
Exceptions to that rule are made for new words. For example, a town near me has a lot of arbutus trees. So, there's Arbutus Driving Academy, Arbutus Music, Arbutus Insurance, Arbutus Electronics. Probably more. That's all fine, they're not competing. Same with Apple. Apple Autoglass, Apple Computers, Apple Music, Green Apple Grocer, all legal, and why there's no Apple iTunes, only iTunes.
But you're wrong about IBM (probably). There's something called trademark dilution. This protects your mark from non-competing markets, too. It doesn't apply to common word trademarks like Apple, Arbutus, and so on. But it applies to made up words like Xerox, Kodak, Microsoft, and so on. If your mark was made up by you, and is distinctive, it cannot be used even in markets which you are not engaged in. This is because, if you're the only one in the world with that name, that mark identifies a "single source". Taking your made-up word and using it as a second source diminishes that, and it is considered a trademark violation most places. There is no requirement to show even the potential for confusion. See 15 U.S.C sections 1127, 1125(c).
So, Jedi Mind could be found to be infringing, since you can argue that when you hear Jedi, you think Star Wars. However, while you don't need to register trademarks to get normal protection, you do need to register trademarks to get dilution protection, even if it IS a nationally recognizable mark. Since they have a mark on "Jedi Knight" they'd have a more difficult time of it, though a recent Second Circuit ruling found that it can still be dilution even if the mark is not identical, if it still is similar enough to makes the customer think of the actual mark. (The mark in question they ruled on was "Charbucks" coffee).
Lexmark isn't suing over ink patents, so there's not much to look into. (Never ever believe a single word in a Slashdot summary, they're wrong almost as a rule).
You can if you only play your own music. Basically what he's saying is that a webcaster needs to pay the Copyright Royalty Board royalties on music, period, even if the CRB doesn't represent the copyright owner. That's because their statutory license deal is "0.33 cents per listener per hour" not "per listener per hour of stuff WE own" just per hour your stream is active. So, if you give your CD to a webcaster to play, they still have to pay royalties on it even if you give them permission to play it at no charge. The webcaster doesn't "have" to agree to these terms, but if they don't they can only play music with written permission of both the copyright owner and the label representing the copyright owner.
They aren't anymore. Copyright cannot protect an idea, only the expression of that idea. However, that has changed. Copyright now protects the very idea itself, with "derivative work" covering even 100% new expressions of the same idea. Copyright was categorically intended not to limit ideas, and now that is its main purpose. For example, it is a copyright violation to make an entirely new story about an existing character from popular literature. This is considered a derivative work. This is absurd and goes against the very idea of copyright, but that's the law as it stands now.
It's more like concluding somebody is a heroin user because they ate a poppy seed muffin. Heroin and other opiates are made from a kind of poppy, after all.
Interesting point. That depends on your interpreted definition of "performance" of the work.
Copyright doesn't give authors exclusive performance rights to their work. It gives them exclusive PUBLIC performance rights. This is held to mean performances made in a public place. I can pay for a pay-per-view event, and invite friends over to watch with me, even though I never bought a public performance license. And, I can even tell them to bring wings or dip or something, and it's still not public. I can even ask them all for a dollar to help me pay for the PPV fee, and it's still not public!
So, along those line (and this should be dead obvious anyways) I am allowed to take a book, and read it to my children. The definition is public performance is actually even more restrictive than just a performance in public. There has to be an element of "performance" to it. That is, a DJ must have a license for public performance in order to play music. However, somebody with a ghetto blaster (unfortunately) doesn't need a license to use his device in a public place. So, given that, I don't need a license from Tor publishing in order to read a book out loud to somebody on a bus or in a park. Since, it's in a public place, but it's not really a performance. (The groups in charge of collecting fees are trying to change this by fiat, as in suing people for not breaking the law, such as going after Girl Guides for allowing their girls to sing campfire songs, and suing resturaunts for having a radio).
At any rate, given that I have the right to read a book out loud in my living room, I have the right to use a device to do it for me. Obviously its easier to make a device that reads an eBook out loud, but if one is legal, they both are. So, an eBook TTS reader has a substantial non-infringing use. The fact that I could also use it in public doesn't make it an illegal device under the DMCA. So, given that it's not an illegal device, there are no grounds for complaint at all. You can argue that Amazon is selling audiobooks without a license, in the same way as you can argue that a cable company that offers a PVR is selling video recordings without a license: poorly. Oh, it's been tried. They lost in court, though. Amazon is not selling audiobooks, they are selling ebooks and a TTS reader. They have a license for the former, and the latter is a legal device.
This delay is also why the talk of smart cars eliminating traffic jams are (technically) possible. If all the cars on the roads are forming an ad hoc network and talking to each other about traffic, they can "see" a traffic jam forming ahead. Then, they can slow down the incoming traffic so, though there would still be cars arriving at the same point faster than every 2 seconds, you can hopefully delay most of them by enough that they arrive after the jam has been cleared. This, of course, relies on either digital speed limit signs that can be updated on the fly (with the majority of motorists obeying speed limits), or, it requires the majority of motorists to listen to their car when it requests they go under the speed limit. Logically, they would be inclined to slow down, because going 10 slower for a while beats being in a traffic jam. However, it ends up being a prisoner's dilemma sort of thing. If everybody else slows down, they all arrive a bit slower. If nobody slows down they arrive a lot slower. If everybody but you slows down, 1 car won't make a difference, and everybody arrives a bit slower, but you arrive just as fast as if there was never a jam at all (assuming you were far enough away when it started forming). So, everybody will want to be "that guy" and it won't work;)
I mowed my grandparent's lawn for some cash and a lemonade, does that mean I should have had a $300 business license, since my grandparents didn't have one (thus I'm not an employee)?
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with the Past-Perfect-In-Future tense ;) (Except perhaps that I just made the term up and there might not be such a thing?)
Opening a letter that's not addressed to you is a crime. Failing to commit a crime is neither lazy or idiotic. The proper course of action is to return to sender. Can you RTS a registered letter? What if it wasn't sent by registered letter, but served in person?
“We’re still going to serve that S.O.B. personally,” Deters said of Richie. “I’m going to make that dirty, rotten, mean, vermin bastard pay. He’s a piece of dirt." Sounds to me like they never served him the first time. Given that they admit to never serving one of the two defendants listed on their complaint, I think it's pretty unlikely the served the first one cormmrectly, either. At any rate, if I got a piece of mail addressed to a person who doesn't live there, I'd return it to sender. It's a felony to open somebody else's mail. So, if thedirt.com got mail incorrectly addressed to thedirty.com and Richie, the owner of thedirty.com, they would be completely wrong in opening it at all. That's an actual crime, not civil but criminal. The lawyers also says they are planning to sue the investors in the LLC to punish them for making money off of libelous writings. I presume this was before he learned his judgment was against the wrong LLC, possibly one he never even served.
TFA mentions 50 years, about 49 years and 364 days short of your "day after". Additionally, the law is on the manufacture of goods with incorrect patent labels, not the sale, so it doesn't matter how long it was in the store. What matters is if you are still making them.
Right, but TFA is talking about expired by 50+ years, not by minutes. If, you make NEW molds and NEW designs that still are labeled with patents that are expired by decades, there's a clear intent to deceive.
Nothing, because the law applies to "making a product that blah blah blah" not "selling a product".
That's not what they say. They are saying that they want the ability to charge more for high priority traffic. That is, packets have priority built into the header, for QoS stuff. If you want your VOIP to go through, you set your priority higher. They want to be able to charge you extra to be able to do that. It's absolutely totally and utterly unrelated to charging for access to particular sites, or prioritizing particular sites.
The egg debate is more complicated than that. Basically, many studies have shown moderate egg intake to have no effect on cholesterol levels. The "Eggs are bad" studies actually conclude that dietary cholesterol impacts blood cholesterol, and therefore that one should avoid dietary cholesterol, which is generally speaking good advice based on their data. But, these are not actually opposite things. Eggs contain cholesterol, but also contain quite a bit of unsaturated fats. Other studies show that unsaturated fats lower cholesterol levels (bad cholesterol anyway) so, taken as a whole, "dietary cholesterol bad" and "eggs not bad in moderation" are not contradictory at all. The advice to avoid cholesterol is not bad per se, but as a general rule is always prone to exceptions. Eggs are one of those eggceptions.
I hope you're not posting on Slashdot from work. Because slacking off at work is considered fraud under the "Honest Services" act, and therefore you are committing a federal felony. Enjoy your execution! ;)
You're confusing Canada with Minnesota.
State Freedom of Information Acts tend to be a lot less broad than the federal one (which only applies to the federal executive branch). Using Michigan as an example, you cannot request all documents relating to a given subject. You have to identify what documents you want, and be specific. In that regard, I highly doubt that you could say "I want all of the email sent by this professor to any of these 40 other people, for the last 5 years". That's absurdly broad. You probably could request all of the documents used to support a research grant application. But, that was to the state. I would think that therefore, the state would already have those documents, so requesting then seems more like harassment. (Unless you can get away with citing but not submitting papers with your grant? That would be weird to allow in the first place...) They also request a list of all documents that have been destroyed, and documents verifying the legitimate reason for their destruction. That one is almost insulting. It's like asking somebody to please list the times they have beaten their wife, and their reasoning for those beatings. Sounds pretty accusatory.
Yeah, that sounds like exactly what happened. Especially considering that she's trying to have her marriage, in which she had 3 kids, completely erased from existence on the grounds that she is a sociopath and thus was not mentally fit to enter into a marriage. (And won)
It breaks down into carbon dioxide after about 10 years (8 point something).
Yeah, that's basically why I have a permenant boycott of Bioware going on. See, the extra weapons and levels for Mass Effect 2 if you buy it new, that's obnoxious. But, they put a used game salesman character onto the Citadel, who chuckles about what a killing he makes, while the starving developers go out of business. They're not content with always on DRM locking out features if you try to install your game on a second 360, they have to kick us in the balls and spit in our faces, too.
It's not just devs, either. Apparently the folks at Penny Arcade believe that buying a used game is actually worse than pirating, because with piracy you are at least not giving money to anybody, but with a used game you are both stealing AND giving money to a leech.
I asked them why selling a used game should be a crime, but lending a friend a game or a book, which they often portray in their comics, is acceptable. No answer. In publishing "both sides" they only publish comments in agreement, or comments "backing up" used games as evil, but a necessary evil for those on a budget. I also pointed them in the direction of a huge piracy mill that's stealing millions of copies of their precious anthologies. No idea their take on that, but I bet they are contacting their lawyers! Their other blazing hypocracy is that their child's play charity donates games and systems to children's wards across the country. Each child doesn't need to pay for their own copy, the developer only gets paid ONCE (a condition they decry as black market theft) and yet, more than one child gets to play. Outrageous.
Facebook launches their "Places" service that is functionally the same as "Foursquare"'s service. Facebook's logo for "Places"? A four in a square. A FOUR IN A SQUARE. And they have the balls to go after somebody for "diluting" their trademark on a generic term for a yearbook, by using the word "book". Simply incredible. I hope they lose and have to pay a legal costs and a few million in punitive damages.
Wrong. Read about trade dilution. It doesn't have to be a competing market if, as you say "everybody would know" that you're referencing somebody else's trademark. And, Ewok is a bad choice because, unlike Jedi, they do have a mark on Ewok alone, whereas they have no mark on Jedi alone, just on Jedi Knight. LucasFlim also has a mark on the word "droid" as an abbreviation of android.
Exceptions to that rule are made for new words. For example, a town near me has a lot of arbutus trees. So, there's Arbutus Driving Academy, Arbutus Music, Arbutus Insurance, Arbutus Electronics. Probably more. That's all fine, they're not competing. Same with Apple. Apple Autoglass, Apple Computers, Apple Music, Green Apple Grocer, all legal, and why there's no Apple iTunes, only iTunes.
But you're wrong about IBM (probably). There's something called trademark dilution. This protects your mark from non-competing markets, too. It doesn't apply to common word trademarks like Apple, Arbutus, and so on. But it applies to made up words like Xerox, Kodak, Microsoft, and so on. If your mark was made up by you, and is distinctive, it cannot be used even in markets which you are not engaged in. This is because, if you're the only one in the world with that name, that mark identifies a "single source". Taking your made-up word and using it as a second source diminishes that, and it is considered a trademark violation most places. There is no requirement to show even the potential for confusion. See 15 U.S.C sections 1127, 1125(c).
So, Jedi Mind could be found to be infringing, since you can argue that when you hear Jedi, you think Star Wars. However, while you don't need to register trademarks to get normal protection, you do need to register trademarks to get dilution protection, even if it IS a nationally recognizable mark. Since they have a mark on "Jedi Knight" they'd have a more difficult time of it, though a recent Second Circuit ruling found that it can still be dilution even if the mark is not identical, if it still is similar enough to makes the customer think of the actual mark. (The mark in question they ruled on was "Charbucks" coffee).
Lexmark isn't suing over ink patents, so there's not much to look into. (Never ever believe a single word in a Slashdot summary, they're wrong almost as a rule).
The article also notes that HP has been filing lawsuits over ink patents.
You can if you only play your own music. Basically what he's saying is that a webcaster needs to pay the Copyright Royalty Board royalties on music, period, even if the CRB doesn't represent the copyright owner. That's because their statutory license deal is "0.33 cents per listener per hour" not "per listener per hour of stuff WE own" just per hour your stream is active. So, if you give your CD to a webcaster to play, they still have to pay royalties on it even if you give them permission to play it at no charge. The webcaster doesn't "have" to agree to these terms, but if they don't they can only play music with written permission of both the copyright owner and the label representing the copyright owner.
They aren't anymore. Copyright cannot protect an idea, only the expression of that idea. However, that has changed. Copyright now protects the very idea itself, with "derivative work" covering even 100% new expressions of the same idea. Copyright was categorically intended not to limit ideas, and now that is its main purpose. For example, it is a copyright violation to make an entirely new story about an existing character from popular literature. This is considered a derivative work. This is absurd and goes against the very idea of copyright, but that's the law as it stands now.
It's more like concluding somebody is a heroin user because they ate a poppy seed muffin. Heroin and other opiates are made from a kind of poppy, after all.
Copyright doesn't give authors exclusive performance rights to their work. It gives them exclusive PUBLIC performance rights. This is held to mean performances made in a public place. I can pay for a pay-per-view event, and invite friends over to watch with me, even though I never bought a public performance license. And, I can even tell them to bring wings or dip or something, and it's still not public. I can even ask them all for a dollar to help me pay for the PPV fee, and it's still not public!
So, along those line (and this should be dead obvious anyways) I am allowed to take a book, and read it to my children. The definition is public performance is actually even more restrictive than just a performance in public. There has to be an element of "performance" to it. That is, a DJ must have a license for public performance in order to play music. However, somebody with a ghetto blaster (unfortunately) doesn't need a license to use his device in a public place. So, given that, I don't need a license from Tor publishing in order to read a book out loud to somebody on a bus or in a park. Since, it's in a public place, but it's not really a performance. (The groups in charge of collecting fees are trying to change this by fiat, as in suing people for not breaking the law, such as going after Girl Guides for allowing their girls to sing campfire songs, and suing resturaunts for having a radio).
At any rate, given that I have the right to read a book out loud in my living room, I have the right to use a device to do it for me. Obviously its easier to make a device that reads an eBook out loud, but if one is legal, they both are. So, an eBook TTS reader has a substantial non-infringing use. The fact that I could also use it in public doesn't make it an illegal device under the DMCA. So, given that it's not an illegal device, there are no grounds for complaint at all. You can argue that Amazon is selling audiobooks without a license, in the same way as you can argue that a cable company that offers a PVR is selling video recordings without a license: poorly. Oh, it's been tried. They lost in court, though. Amazon is not selling audiobooks, they are selling ebooks and a TTS reader. They have a license for the former, and the latter is a legal device.
This delay is also why the talk of smart cars eliminating traffic jams are (technically) possible. If all the cars on the roads are forming an ad hoc network and talking to each other about traffic, they can "see" a traffic jam forming ahead. Then, they can slow down the incoming traffic so, though there would still be cars arriving at the same point faster than every 2 seconds, you can hopefully delay most of them by enough that they arrive after the jam has been cleared. This, of course, relies on either digital speed limit signs that can be updated on the fly (with the majority of motorists obeying speed limits), or, it requires the majority of motorists to listen to their car when it requests they go under the speed limit. Logically, they would be inclined to slow down, because going 10 slower for a while beats being in a traffic jam. However, it ends up being a prisoner's dilemma sort of thing. If everybody else slows down, they all arrive a bit slower. If nobody slows down they arrive a lot slower. If everybody but you slows down, 1 car won't make a difference, and everybody arrives a bit slower, but you arrive just as fast as if there was never a jam at all (assuming you were far enough away when it started forming). So, everybody will want to be "that guy" and it won't work ;)
I mowed my grandparent's lawn for some cash and a lemonade, does that mean I should have had a $300 business license, since my grandparents didn't have one (thus I'm not an employee)?