Legal Aid has nothing whatsoever to do with the payment of judges. It's a system for providing access to the court system for people who can't afford to do it for themselves.
It isn't controlled by local authorities. It's administered by the Legal Aid Agency, which is an agency of central government.
Local authorities have no role in running the court system, which is administered by the Courts and Tribunals Agency (also an agency of the MoJ)
The bulk of police salaries is paid centrally by the Home Office through the Police Fund, which is administered by the local Police & Crime Commissioner. The additional item in your Council Tax bill (technically known as a "precept") is basically a means by which the Commissioner can raise additional funds, subject to limits on his or her ability to increase the precept from year to year.
I can't wait for your private prosecutions against named judges. With your detailed grasp of the operation of the court system, I can't imagine how anything could possibly go wrong.
This isn't to defend the behaviour of the pharmaceutical industry, which does seem to embrace some very dubious practices; but I don't think you can seriously dispute that their development costs really are very high - particularly if you're also writing-off the development costs of failed products at the same time - so their argument still has more merit than the GP allows
You know, the fact that copyright infringement isn't theft pretty much renders the argument that "it's quite possible, for instance, that a person downloading a song, would never have bought it otherwise" irrelevant. I know it's the next step on the Slashdot anti-copyright argument go-to list, but it's just total bullshit in this context, even if it's true as a statement of fact.
Copyright infringement isn't theft - that's why it's separately defined; but copyright is infringed by the act of (unauthorised) copying. That, not whether you'd have bought the same product for money, is the nature of the offence.
why should the amount spent on advertising be relevant to the discussion? If I spend £100 million developing a new drug and £101 million marketing it (because I need it to be a commercial success if I'm going to recoup the R&D costs), I've still spent £100 million on development.
Given that conspiracy to commit a crime is a crime in itself (both in the UK and the USA), I suspect that you're wrong about this. I'm pretty certain that you can be convicted of conspiracy even if that which you conspired to do wasn't a crime, as long as you believed it to be a crime when you were doing the conspiring (got that?).
"It's no different than seeing an unlocked door. You wouldn't just walk in and look around would you?
Do it all the time - I don't actually remember the last time a business had someone out front asking me to come in."
Sorry, but this really devalues your earlier points. The first two paragraphs deserve their "insightful" mod, but it's quite apparent from TFA that this case concerened someone who was exploiting a domestic set-up. Not being actively invited into a commercial premises is clearly a totally different thing to not being actively invited into a residential one, and trying to equate the two in the context of this particular story is disingenuous.
You know, that's what I thought. I thought "this summary is a predictable Slashdot misrepresentation of a serious case about propriety in public spending".
Then I read TFA, and found that they're not suggesting anything improper happened in the purchasing process, just that they'd have liked to have won and would like the court to say that they did. Their case really does appear to be as eye-rollingly, barking-at-the-moon insane as the summary makes it sound.
Torchwood is okay at best, and is striving for something between Buffy and the X-files, without really getting there (obviously, it's better than the X-Files was once it turned into the most embarrassingly-up-it's-own-backside show of the last twenty years, but what isn't?). One or two episodes were quite good - the one narrated by the dead guy, and I believe the series finale was pretty good (I'll have to watch my recording of it some time). In general though, it rapidly became something to be watched if it happened to be on, rather than an "appointment to view".
Ultraviolet was a terrific series, and one that I could certainly stand to see again. It starred Jack Davenport, from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and Idris Elba, lately of The Wire, among others.
"the IP business is about selling stuff that doesn't really exist... it's stuff you pull it out of your ass and sell to other people"
So true. Because South Park just sort of happens, the individual elements gradually coalescing - in curious defiance of the entropic principle - into a coherent form which can be recognised as a television programme.
Same thing with The Daily Show. John Stewart doesn't actually exist at all: he's a transient phenomenon which just happens to manifest at exactly the right time to interact with the random people who wander in off the street and coincidentally stand in front of the cameras that, purely by chance, are positioned in the building which houses all the production facilities that mysteriously dropped out of the sky one day for no apparent reason.
None of this requires any money to set up. No-one involved needs to be paid, no administrative or creative effort was expended, no costs of any kind accrued. So you're completely right that it's an imaginary product that only a money-grubbing whore could possibly try and profit from.
Well, it's either that or you're a drooling simpleton.
The people running this forum won't lose the anonymity aspect of it. Quoting from TFA ("Cohen" is one of the forum owners):
Cohen said he no longer keeps identifying information on users because he does not want to encourage lawsuits and drive traffic away. Asked why posters could not use their real names, he said, "People would not have as much fun, frankly, if they had to worry about employers pulling up information on them."
He wants posters to "have fun", and they won't have as much fun if they can't trash whoever they want anonymously. I suspect that this post here, from further down this discussion, is just about right.
That was the first thing that occurred to me, too. Maybe what it signifies is that competition is very strong and the companies involved can afford to be very risk-averse, and shy away from even a hint of controversy.
"Although most FCC documents, records, and publications are accessible through FOIA, some types of FCC records are not available. Section 552(b) of the FOIA contains nine types of records which are routinely exempt from disclosure under the FOIA:
...
4. Trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential, 5 U.S.C 552(b)(4);"
The reason I asked was that in a utilitarian scenario, the costs of copyright are borne by society not as an act of charity towards artists (something you've been pretty clear about on a number of occasions) but because they serve society's interests. If that's the case, isn't it also the case that anything which undermines the implied "deal" between artists and society also undermines the benefit which society expected to get out of that deal? In that respect, it doesn't seem to me that there's all that much of a philosophical difference (in law enforcement terms) between copyright infringement and all kinds of other crimes (particularly "economic" crimes, like fraud) which only have a few direct victims, but which are regarded as criminal matters because they undermine the stability of our society in general.
I'm not saying that copyright infringement is necessarily a full-on assault on our economic and social well-being, because clearly it's not; but if we regard the creation of artistic works as being important enough to our common interests that it's worth incentivising at all, shouldn't we regard it as important enough to defend the integrity of the incentive?
"You sue them. You know, it's the way that everyone has enforced copyrights since they were first invented"
You say that your view on copyright is utilitarian and that your goal is to get the best deal for society in general, even if that means trading-off some freedoms on a short-term basis. That being the case, do you support treating copyright violation as a criminal, rather than a civil, offence? If not, why not?
Yup, nothing says "my attitude is not the problem" more clearly than "If you want good IT support then show your IT people RESPECT and get the FUCK out of our way"
"Lets see if they get round to counting songs that are downloaded for free too.
"
If they ever devised a way to count this accurately it would be a disaster for anyone using the argument that downloaders aren't just chisellers after a free ride, but crusaders against excessive copyright terms. How are you going to explain the fact that the top 40 isn't made up of all that Lithuanian goatherd music that everyone claims they're saving from enforced oblivion at the hands of evil labels that won't release it themselves but won't let anyone else distribute in violatation of their fifty year old copyrights; but instead mainly features the latest Xtina mega-ballad and this week's demographically-balanced boy band's non-threatening-white-boy rap?
This article from The Times this week suggests that the beneficiaries may well be much longer-established acts.
Your argument doesn't stand up to the realities of the UK charts. This won't help the labels to promote the latest hot, new thing (whose download sales are already included in the chart calculation, so long as their music is also available on physical media) half as much as it'll help bands from twenty years ago. Those bands' back-catalogue download sales to 40-somethings like me who are filling up their MP3 players with the music of their youth will quite possibly project them back into the charts.
Criminal cases are brought by the state on behalf of society in general. The state prosecutes murder trials because it is in everybody's interest that murderers are punished and potential murderers deterred, as far as possible.
Because CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet; and style and layout are not the same thing. Style is fonts, colours, line spacing and stuff. CSS is great for style, particularly so where you want to apply a single style consistently across many pages. Layout is about how the building blocks of the page hang together. You can do this using CSS, in the same way that you can handle style using html, but it's not ideal (although on balance I'd rather use CSS for layout than html for style). All of the CSS kludges I can think of right off the top of my head relate to problems of layout, rather than style (unless you want to count image-replacement techniques, which I suppose are a sub-set of style, rather than layout).
10 years is a limited time. 50 years is a limited time. "Copyright holder's life plus 70 years" is a limited time. The current state of copyright law in the UK and, as far as I can see, the USA clearly encompasses a limited time. The language of your constitution is vague: I assume that it was meant to be vague so as to allow legislators scope for flexibility, but right now the law is clearly within that scope.
As far as DRM is concerned, once copyright on a work expires there are presumably no rights left to enforce. Even under the DCMA (given that this is a USA-centric discussion), is it permissable to circumvent a measure which is not actually protecting anything?
So the whole project costs $16 with Windows and $12 with Linux? Something tells me that these figures need firming up and may, in fact, just have been pulled out of thin air.
You say it would be "stupid from a technological and functional perspective, but... just the kind of "solution" that power-hungry governments would like to implement" because you've got a US-ian perspective and presumably don't have a huge problem with the status quo. Other people do have a problem with the status quo, because when they think of a "power-hungry government", they think of the USA.
Fortunately, the solution is relatively straightforward. The fact is that the US government paid for the infrastructure that supports the existing DNS. If anyone else doesn't like it, they can pay to build their own infrastructure. Yes, that'll cause some problems, but on the other hand, you'll be free from US government interference. That's a trade-off some countries might be willing to make: like you, I'm surprised that China hasn't done it already.
This subject is the cue for a feast of nationalistic dick-swinging every time it comes up, so let's just accept that:
many people distrust the US government
the US government does have a unique position of power over the internet, and if "full spectrum dominance" means anything at all, it means that they would use it if it suited them to do so
the US government isn't going to relinquish their position any more than the governments of any one of dozens of countries would if they found themselves in the same situation; nor is there any compelling moral case for them to do so
any country that finds the situation intolerable is free to build their own infrastructure and govern it themselves
no matter how internationalised content has become, complaining that the US isn't giving the rest of us a whopping great free gift is not the same thing as presenting a moral argument
According to a very interesting analysis of the case which was originally linked from another/. story on this case a couple of days ago, Spamhaus's problem is that they tacitly accepted the court's jurisdiction at the start, which makes it very difficult to claim otherwise now:
"Spamhaus may have waived personal jurisdiction as a defense early on in the case when they not only appeared, but then asked for the case to be removed from state court (where it was originally filed) and moved to federal district court (where it is today). Arguably, and this makes sense intuitively even if you don't understand the finer points of U.S. civil procedure, doing so inherently acknowledged the jurisdiction of the federal court."
The exact quote from the Library of Congress (and kudos for actually linking to a source with some serious credibility) is: "Released murderers, rapists, and child molesters are more likely to recommit the same offense than the general prison population. Released murderers are almost five times more likely than other ex-convicts to be rearrested for murder. Released rapists are 10 1/2 times more likely than nonrapist offenders to have a subsequent arrest for rape." That sounds pretty frightful, but your interpretation of it is flawed.
Just examining the comment about murderers (since the sentence about rapists simply repeats the same logic with different numbers), all he has said is that murderers are more likely to commit murder than non-murderers. Unless you know the rate at which people are imprisoned for a crime other than murder, released and subsequently commit murder, this tells you nothing.
Say that ten thousand people are convicted of lesser offences, serve their time and are released, and that one of them subsequently commits a murder. In the same period, two thousand people are convicted of murder, serve their time, and one subsequently commits another murder. This satisfies Fox's statement that "released murderers are almost five times more likely than other ex-convicts to be rearrested for murder", but the rate of reoffending is only 0.05%. Obviously, I've just plucked these exact numbers out of the air, largely to keep the maths easy, but the general principle holds.
I'm not questioning Fox's sincerity, but the way it's presented comes across as an eye-catching factoid that plays well to an audience who probably aren't all that good at interpreting statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
Legal Aid has nothing whatsoever to do with the payment of judges. It's a system for providing access to the court system for people who can't afford to do it for themselves.
It isn't controlled by local authorities. It's administered by the Legal Aid Agency, which is an agency of central government.
Local authorities have no role in running the court system, which is administered by the Courts and Tribunals Agency (also an agency of the MoJ)
The bulk of police salaries is paid centrally by the Home Office through the Police Fund, which is administered by the local Police & Crime Commissioner. The additional item in your Council Tax bill (technically known as a "precept") is basically a means by which the Commissioner can raise additional funds, subject to limits on his or her ability to increase the precept from year to year.
I can't wait for your private prosecutions against named judges. With your detailed grasp of the operation of the court system, I can't imagine how anything could possibly go wrong.
Trident vs. Blue Streak?
The Blue Streak which was never deployed and was cancelled as a programme in 1960
vs.
The Trident that was purchased by the British Government in 1982
What would the question have been? Would it have included the 22-year gap? Would it have mentioned Skybolt or Polaris?
This isn't to defend the behaviour of the pharmaceutical industry, which does seem to embrace some very dubious practices; but I don't think you can seriously dispute that their development costs really are very high - particularly if you're also writing-off the development costs of failed products at the same time - so their argument still has more merit than the GP allows
Copyright infringement isn't theft - that's why it's separately defined; but copyright is infringed by the act of (unauthorised) copying. That, not whether you'd have bought the same product for money, is the nature of the offence.
why should the amount spent on advertising be relevant to the discussion? If I spend £100 million developing a new drug and £101 million marketing it (because I need it to be a commercial success if I'm going to recoup the R&D costs), I've still spent £100 million on development.
Given that conspiracy to commit a crime is a crime in itself (both in the UK and the USA), I suspect that you're wrong about this. I'm pretty certain that you can be convicted of conspiracy even if that which you conspired to do wasn't a crime, as long as you believed it to be a crime when you were doing the conspiring (got that?).
Sorry, but this really devalues your earlier points. The first two paragraphs deserve their "insightful" mod, but it's quite apparent from TFA that this case concerened someone who was exploiting a domestic set-up. Not being actively invited into a commercial premises is clearly a totally different thing to not being actively invited into a residential one, and trying to equate the two in the context of this particular story is disingenuous.
Then I read TFA, and found that they're not suggesting anything improper happened in the purchasing process, just that they'd have liked to have won and would like the court to say that they did. Their case really does appear to be as eye-rollingly, barking-at-the-moon insane as the summary makes it sound.
Torchwood is okay at best, and is striving for something between Buffy and the X-files, without really getting there (obviously, it's better than the X-Files was once it turned into the most embarrassingly-up-it's-own-backside show of the last twenty years, but what isn't?). One or two episodes were quite good - the one narrated by the dead guy, and I believe the series finale was pretty good (I'll have to watch my recording of it some time). In general though, it rapidly became something to be watched if it happened to be on, rather than an "appointment to view".
Ultraviolet was a terrific series, and one that I could certainly stand to see again. It starred Jack Davenport, from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and Idris Elba, lately of The Wire, among others.
Same thing with The Daily Show. John Stewart doesn't actually exist at all: he's a transient phenomenon which just happens to manifest at exactly the right time to interact with the random people who wander in off the street and coincidentally stand in front of the cameras that, purely by chance, are positioned in the building which houses all the production facilities that mysteriously dropped out of the sky one day for no apparent reason.
None of this requires any money to set up. No-one involved needs to be paid, no administrative or creative effort was expended, no costs of any kind accrued. So you're completely right that it's an imaginary product that only a money-grubbing whore could possibly try and profit from.
Well, it's either that or you're a drooling simpleton.
That was the first thing that occurred to me, too. Maybe what it signifies is that competition is very strong and the companies involved can afford to be very risk-averse, and shy away from even a hint of controversy.
Presumably they're relying on this one:
"Although most FCC documents, records, and publications are accessible through FOIA, some types of FCC records are not available. Section 552(b) of the FOIA contains nine types of records which are routinely exempt from disclosure under the FOIA:
...
4. Trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential, 5 U.S.C 552(b)(4);"
I'm not saying that copyright infringement is necessarily a full-on assault on our economic and social well-being, because clearly it's not; but if we regard the creation of artistic works as being important enough to our common interests that it's worth incentivising at all, shouldn't we regard it as important enough to defend the integrity of the incentive?
You say that your view on copyright is utilitarian and that your goal is to get the best deal for society in general, even if that means trading-off some freedoms on a short-term basis. That being the case, do you support treating copyright violation as a criminal, rather than a civil, offence? If not, why not?
Yup, nothing says "my attitude is not the problem" more clearly than "If you want good IT support then show your IT people RESPECT and get the FUCK out of our way"
If they ever devised a way to count this accurately it would be a disaster for anyone using the argument that downloaders aren't just chisellers after a free ride, but crusaders against excessive copyright terms. How are you going to explain the fact that the top 40 isn't made up of all that Lithuanian goatherd music that everyone claims they're saving from enforced oblivion at the hands of evil labels that won't release it themselves but won't let anyone else distribute in violatation of their fifty year old copyrights; but instead mainly features the latest Xtina mega-ballad and this week's demographically-balanced boy band's non-threatening-white-boy rap?
Your argument doesn't stand up to the realities of the UK charts. This won't help the labels to promote the latest hot, new thing (whose download sales are already included in the chart calculation, so long as their music is also available on physical media) half as much as it'll help bands from twenty years ago. Those bands' back-catalogue download sales to 40-somethings like me who are filling up their MP3 players with the music of their youth will quite possibly project them back into the charts.
Criminal cases are brought by the state on behalf of society in general. The state prosecutes murder trials because it is in everybody's interest that murderers are punished and potential murderers deterred, as far as possible.
Because CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet; and style and layout are not the same thing. Style is fonts, colours, line spacing and stuff. CSS is great for style, particularly so where you want to apply a single style consistently across many pages. Layout is about how the building blocks of the page hang together. You can do this using CSS, in the same way that you can handle style using html, but it's not ideal (although on balance I'd rather use CSS for layout than html for style). All of the CSS kludges I can think of right off the top of my head relate to problems of layout, rather than style (unless you want to count image-replacement techniques, which I suppose are a sub-set of style, rather than layout).
As far as DRM is concerned, once copyright on a work expires there are presumably no rights left to enforce. Even under the DCMA (given that this is a USA-centric discussion), is it permissable to circumvent a measure which is not actually protecting anything?
So the whole project costs $16 with Windows and $12 with Linux? Something tells me that these figures need firming up and may, in fact, just have been pulled out of thin air.
Fortunately, the solution is relatively straightforward. The fact is that the US government paid for the infrastructure that supports the existing DNS. If anyone else doesn't like it, they can pay to build their own infrastructure. Yes, that'll cause some problems, but on the other hand, you'll be free from US government interference. That's a trade-off some countries might be willing to make: like you, I'm surprised that China hasn't done it already.
This subject is the cue for a feast of nationalistic dick-swinging every time it comes up, so let's just accept that:
"Spamhaus may have waived personal jurisdiction as a defense early on in the case when they not only appeared, but then asked for the case to be removed from state court (where it was originally filed) and moved to federal district court (where it is today). Arguably, and this makes sense intuitively even if you don't understand the finer points of U.S. civil procedure, doing so inherently acknowledged the jurisdiction of the federal court."
Just examining the comment about murderers (since the sentence about rapists simply repeats the same logic with different numbers), all he has said is that murderers are more likely to commit murder than non-murderers. Unless you know the rate at which people are imprisoned for a crime other than murder, released and subsequently commit murder, this tells you nothing.
Say that ten thousand people are convicted of lesser offences, serve their time and are released, and that one of them subsequently commits a murder. In the same period, two thousand people are convicted of murder, serve their time, and one subsequently commits another murder. This satisfies Fox's statement that "released murderers are almost five times more likely than other ex-convicts to be rearrested for murder", but the rate of reoffending is only 0.05%. Obviously, I've just plucked these exact numbers out of the air, largely to keep the maths easy, but the general principle holds.
I'm not questioning Fox's sincerity, but the way it's presented comes across as an eye-catching factoid that plays well to an audience who probably aren't all that good at interpreting statistics.