A licence like that will never stand up in court. It would be a total and utter violation of the Sale of Goods Act. Not necessarily. If that were true, it would also be true of software EULAs. But software EULAs rely on the ruling that in order to use a piece of software, you have to make a copy of it, and copyright gives the holder control over anyone making copies. In this case, again, the jig is used by making copies of it, so if the manufacturer has a copyright on the design, the EULA might be valid by the same reasoning.
In real life, you see this with flood insurance and people building houses on flood plains. Without insurance, hardly anyone would be stupid enough to build there, or at worst would build very flood-proof houses. With insurance being available, people know they are covered and build (or rebuild) houses in places that houses simply shouldn't exist.
Interesting contrast. Here in the UK there seems to be much less trouble with getting some kind of health cover, but uninsurable property is getting more and more common. I'm pretty sure flood plains are now up there on the 'not a chance' list along with eroding coastal locations.
Well, they would be in for some real trouble - perhaps under criminal law - if they were to go ahead, invoice and get money out of people, then get crapped on in court and their claims over Linux to be thrown out.
Actually, probably not. If they had gone ahead with sending out licences, those licences would no doubt have covered a legitimate SCO product, with the linux part as an additonal term of the licence. As an unsolicited invoice, the receiver would be free to ignore it, but anyone stupid enough to pay it would have no comeback.
If I build a car, give it away for free and its brakes fail while going 40 mph in a city and it plows through a kindergarten on an excursion, shouldn't I be held responsible? Why shouldn't I be held responsible, even though I didn't get any money from it?
Possibly. But if it was then discovered that actually, someone else cut the brake cables, is it still your fault for leaving them where just anyone could get to them?
I guess if you are using so much bandwidth that the ISP is losing money on you they might have an argument for capping, but otherwise it just seems suicidal. The trouble is that you don't have to be using that much before they're losing money, or at least not making enough to cover the other aspects of the service. So whether they keep you on or lose you, in the long term it's suicidal either way.
If someone else can slap his or her name on my stuff, and do whatever they pleased with it, I'd be extremely pissed. For example, a lot of you coders out there may code and contribute to open source software, not profiting a dime from it. You do, however, get the credit. Indeed. Back before Open Source was a widely-used term, and plain old Freeware was still common, I used to write and release games for the joy of creating something and having it out there with my name on. Attribution is large part of the reason for copyright, and people can't be relied upon to do the right thing, so although I'd like to see the 'control of distribution' part of copyright severely limited, the 'right to be recognised as the author of a work' part needs to stay.
It's fairly new to us, mainly because it's only recently become legal. At one time it was illegal for solicitors to advertise at all, and until very recently it was still limited to listings of their contact details and the types of representation they offered. As so often happens with deregulation, once companies are free to do something, they pull out all the stops.
The other difference in the UK is that we have very few large law firms, so the companies advertising are really just call centres that then subcontract the legal work once they have a customer.
Maybe what they're doing is downloading the song and using Kazaa as their media player, not realizing they're actually retaining a copy of the song and sharing (which is turned ON by default if memory serves me right). If this is the case, they're probably sharing quite a bit.
By "let it go", I suspect she means "forget about it, having no idea that it's sitting in My Shared Folder for anyone else to download". So yes, if they are that ignorant about how Kazaa works and have been downloading songs every time they wanted to listen to them, they might well be sharing thousands of files.
The RIAA needs to sack the lawyers and send their marketing people back to school for the fundamentals.
Remember, the RIAA is a trade organisation. It only has lawyers, it's the labels who have the marketing people. And while those marketing people might be having a fit, the labels won't act to change anything until the comeback is against them directly rather than the RIAA.
Articles need to start pointing out the labels and artists on whose behalf the RIAA is suing (information which should be available, it has to be stated in the suit). Then the labels might start getting cold feet and do something to rein in the RIAA.
BTW, what is the genre of "The Reality Disfunction" by Peter F. Hamilton? Seems to be SF, but does have some other elements. It does appear to have other (horror and supernatural) elements, and one of the things that kept me reading to the end of the trilogy was to see whether these events are explained, and whether it turns out to be a supernatural or scientific explanation. Even knowing the answer to that would spoil the suspense, so I won't say any more.
As others here have noted, the blanks sold at record stores would usually be the type specifically labelled as Music CDs, and therefore have a tax added to them that goes directly to the RIAA to compensate them for 'piracy.'
Is that still the case over there? Here in the UK the music CDRs have disappeared from the shops over the last couple of years - obviously audio CD recorders weren't very popular - and even HMV and Virgin only carry data CDRs.
Interestingly, the free-for-personal use personal firewall product I'm using DOES use checksums to check whether binaries that may have specific permissions (to access the internet or open ports) have changed!
And if that's the same one I'm using, apps can be added manually to the list, so it's not restricted to network-capable software. You could use it to check everything if you so wished.
THIS PAGE SHOULD NOT BE LEFT BLANK. OOPS, JUST KIDDING.
etc. etc...
Not the only people to have done that. I was working for the UK distributor of PageStream (ST and Amiga DTP package, which should give you some idea how far back I'm going) and the draft manual was full of similar comments ("LEFT PAGE LEFT BLANK, RIGHT PAGE RIGHT ON" and so on). Don't know if they ever made it into the final version.
The reason for the "THIS PAGE iINTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK" is of course to let the proofreader and/or printers know that it's not an error - which is probably why you don't see it so much now, nobody actually expects printers to notice errors any more.
If you have trouble finding a job, where does it say that you have to put the PhD on the resume? Maybe you just spent a few years at a university as a research asst...
Having lost one job in IT, and been unable to get straight back into a similar position, I'm in exactly that position. I'm aiming a bit lower and at least half of the CVs I'm sending out don't mention the PhD. It didn't hurt that I was actually getting paid as a research assistant while doing the PhD.
'Good faith' just means 'we really do think there's an infringing file, we're not doing this for ulterior motives'. It has no element of actually requiring effort to confirm the belief.
Which is a shame, it would be a good balance to the law if the property owners did have to invest some time and effort before getting a file taken down. But of course the whole law was drafted by people who were specifically trying to avoid having to go to any effort to protect their IP.
Everybody rejoices seeing SCO wasted by "the big guns" from IBM, but beware the awakening when the patent infringement guns point in the face of FS.
If they'd wanted to do that, they could have done so years ago. IBM has a huge patent portfolio, some very broad, which they only ever seem to use defensively, or in securing a good deal with other people whose IP they want to use.
Of course, that attitude could change in future, but SCO have provided them with a perfect example of what would happen to their popularity if they started using those patents aggressively.
They don't construct the image at all. All they've patented is the sensor array to detect interaction with a hologram, it's fairly useless until they or someone else figures out how to generate the hologram itself.
The RIAA do know. They have apparently started asking for account information for anyone who posts MP3s through Easynews, no word yet whether they have figured out that there are other news providers.
Sort of. What would actually happen is that if your device happened to be in range of someone's receiver and interfered with the channel they were trying to listen to, they could make a complaint and the equipment would be confiscated.
They are, if they use that part of the spectrum and are over a certain signal strength. I remember as a child that mail-ordering what were basically grey imports was the only way to get a set that would work more than a few metres apart.
members of the broadband content industry See, here's the problem. Too many people think there is legitimately such a thing as a 'broadband content industry', distinct from 'anyone with an internet connection'.
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A licence like that will never stand up in court. It would be a total and utter violation of the Sale of Goods Act. Not necessarily. If that were true, it would also be true of software EULAs. But software EULAs rely on the ruling that in order to use a piece of software, you have to make a copy of it, and copyright gives the holder control over anyone making copies. In this case, again, the jig is used by making copies of it, so if the manufacturer has a copyright on the design, the EULA might be valid by the same reasoning.
Interesting contrast. Here in the UK there seems to be much less trouble with getting some kind of health cover, but uninsurable property is getting more and more common. I'm pretty sure flood plains are now up there on the 'not a chance' list along with eroding coastal locations.
Actually, probably not. If they had gone ahead with sending out licences, those licences would no doubt have covered a legitimate SCO product, with the linux part as an additonal term of the licence. As an unsolicited invoice, the receiver would be free to ignore it, but anyone stupid enough to pay it would have no comeback.
Possibly. But if it was then discovered that actually, someone else cut the brake cables, is it still your fault for leaving them where just anyone could get to them?
I guess if you are using so much bandwidth that the ISP is losing money on you they might have an argument for capping, but otherwise it just seems suicidal. The trouble is that you don't have to be using that much before they're losing money, or at least not making enough to cover the other aspects of the service. So whether they keep you on or lose you, in the long term it's suicidal either way.
Yes, they did stop (and as far as I know, they never got to the point of disabling connections, just sending out warning letters).
If someone else can slap his or her name on my stuff, and do whatever they pleased with it, I'd be extremely pissed. For example, a lot of you coders out there may code and contribute to open source software, not profiting a dime from it. You do, however, get the credit. Indeed. Back before Open Source was a widely-used term, and plain old Freeware was still common, I used to write and release games for the joy of creating something and having it out there with my name on. Attribution is large part of the reason for copyright, and people can't be relied upon to do the right thing, so although I'd like to see the 'control of distribution' part of copyright severely limited, the 'right to be recognised as the author of a work' part needs to stay.
It's fairly new to us, mainly because it's only recently become legal. At one time it was illegal for solicitors to advertise at all, and until very recently it was still limited to listings of their contact details and the types of representation they offered. As so often happens with deregulation, once companies are free to do something, they pull out all the stops. The other difference in the UK is that we have very few large law firms, so the companies advertising are really just call centres that then subcontract the legal work once they have a customer.
That's how I read it, yes.
By "let it go", I suspect she means "forget about it, having no idea that it's sitting in My Shared Folder for anyone else to download". So yes, if they are that ignorant about how Kazaa works and have been downloading songs every time they wanted to listen to them, they might well be sharing thousands of files.
Remember, the RIAA is a trade organisation. It only has lawyers, it's the labels who have the marketing people. And while those marketing people might be having a fit, the labels won't act to change anything until the comeback is against them directly rather than the RIAA.
Articles need to start pointing out the labels and artists on whose behalf the RIAA is suing (information which should be available, it has to be stated in the suit). Then the labels might start getting cold feet and do something to rein in the RIAA.
BTW, what is the genre of "The Reality Disfunction" by Peter F. Hamilton? Seems to be SF, but does have some other elements. It does appear to have other (horror and supernatural) elements, and one of the things that kept me reading to the end of the trilogy was to see whether these events are explained, and whether it turns out to be a supernatural or scientific explanation. Even knowing the answer to that would spoil the suspense, so I won't say any more.
Is that still the case over there? Here in the UK the music CDRs have disappeared from the shops over the last couple of years - obviously audio CD recorders weren't very popular - and even HMV and Virgin only carry data CDRs.
And if that's the same one I'm using, apps can be added manually to the list, so it's not restricted to network-capable software. You could use it to check everything if you so wished.
THIS PAGE SHOULD NOT BE LEFT BLANK. OOPS, JUST KIDDING.
etc. etc...
Not the only people to have done that. I was working for the UK distributor of PageStream (ST and Amiga DTP package, which should give you some idea how far back I'm going) and the draft manual was full of similar comments ("LEFT PAGE LEFT BLANK, RIGHT PAGE RIGHT ON" and so on). Don't know if they ever made it into the final version.
The reason for the "THIS PAGE iINTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK" is of course to let the proofreader and/or printers know that it's not an error - which is probably why you don't see it so much now, nobody actually expects printers to notice errors any more.
Having lost one job in IT, and been unable to get straight back into a similar position, I'm in exactly that position. I'm aiming a bit lower and at least half of the CVs I'm sending out don't mention the PhD. It didn't hurt that I was actually getting paid as a research assistant while doing the PhD.
Which is a shame, it would be a good balance to the law if the property owners did have to invest some time and effort before getting a file taken down. But of course the whole law was drafted by people who were specifically trying to avoid having to go to any effort to protect their IP.
Except that the letter goes to the ISP, so the owner of the file may never see it, let alone get a chance to reply before losing the account.
If they'd wanted to do that, they could have done so years ago. IBM has a huge patent portfolio, some very broad, which they only ever seem to use defensively, or in securing a good deal with other people whose IP they want to use.
Of course, that attitude could change in future, but SCO have provided them with a perfect example of what would happen to their popularity if they started using those patents aggressively.
They don't construct the image at all. All they've patented is the sensor array to detect interaction with a hologram, it's fairly useless until they or someone else figures out how to generate the hologram itself.
What part of 'on or before December 31, 2002' are you having a problem with?
The RIAA do know. They have apparently started asking for account information for anyone who posts MP3s through Easynews, no word yet whether they have figured out that there are other news providers.
Sort of. What would actually happen is that if your device happened to be in range of someone's receiver and interfered with the channel they were trying to listen to, they could make a complaint and the equipment would be confiscated.
They are, if they use that part of the spectrum and are over a certain signal strength. I remember as a child that mail-ordering what were basically grey imports was the only way to get a set that would work more than a few metres apart.
members of the broadband content industry See, here's the problem. Too many people think there is legitimately such a thing as a 'broadband content industry', distinct from 'anyone with an internet connection'.