The priorities in bankruptcy are complicated, whether in Ch7 or Ch11. Secured creditors(usually the company's financing bank) get paid ahead of general usecured creditors. There's usually very little left for unsecureds. In any bankruptcy general unsecured creditors==screwed; they will be lucky to get cents on the dollar. A judgment creditor like the one here is considered a general unsecured creditor till they levy on the assets of the debtor. That's why X10 immediately filed bankruptcy; to prevent the judgemnt creditor from levying on its assets.
Also, 90% of Ch11 bankruptcies wind up in liquidation either through conversion of the case to a Ch7 or through the filing of a liquidation plan.
"private equity funding"?? Does anybody else think this deal smells? These guys are just a front for some private investors, i.e. they supposedly solicited the the investment from some third parties after putting together the package for an equity purchase in SCO. I wonder who those third parties are? Well you'll never know because it's a private placement. This is just a device for concealing who is really behind the funding. If your ever able to dig down through the byzantine structure of corporate, partnership and limited partnership entities that are the private investors, I think you know who you'll find at the bottom of the heap; those who have an interest in seeing this litigation continue regardless of its outcome.
Stalling is pretty much par for the course in civil litigation. You send out your written discovery, interrogatories and document production requests.The other side says they need more time and that is negotiated. You finally get your responses which are generally not responsive at all; you argue about that with the other side; if you can't resolve it you file a motion to compel and argue the motion in court; the judge sets a time for the other side to comply. You get further responses from the other side but not full compliance; more negotiations, back to court again for further motions to compel. The judge finally gets fed up with the other side's intansigence and reads them the riot act. It goes on forever and you eventually get what you need.
Are judges aware of this game? Sure but judicial tempermant varies greatly on how much they will put up with and their time is limited. They have hundreds of cases to administer and can't really micromanage discovery disputes. Usual disputes for written discovery revolve around vague generalities given in responses and the proponent's desire to have a more specific response. At some point the judge determines that the responses are specific enough and that if you want more specific info you should take the depositons of the opposing party's witnesses which launches another round of evasive answers during questioning of the witnesses. You just have to keep pushing to get what you want and eventually you will but nobody gives it to you; it's generally like pulling teeth. This dance will go on for a long time IMHO.
1. Breaking an unjust law is called civil disobedience. Laws that are out of sync with the the sentiments of the majority of the populace are not going to be obeyed. Civil disobedience is a stage in the process of altering unjust laws.
2. Our present recording artists didn't invent music; they didn't invent rock and roll and they're not paying any royalties to those that did. Their creations are based upon are common human heritage of invention and artistic creation that belongs to all. IP rights, the ownership of ideas, has always been limited in appreciation fo this obious fact. They may have created something new, but they didn't do it in a vacuum. To analogize IP rights to personal or real property rights is to ignore these distinctions which inevitably leads to erroneous conclusions, i.e. "They own it so if you take it your stealing." It's not stealing or theft in any legal sense; it's a violation of the owner's limited property rights granted under our current IP laws, in this case copyright infringement.
3. Once you get past your simple minded approach you can address the real policy issue - what is the best social policy on the IP rights of music copyright holders vs the public's interest in assuring that new innovation is reurned to the public domain from which it was derived. You need look no further than the US Constitution. The only justification for IP protection given is to foster innovation in the arts and sciences, i.e. to grant limited property rights to IP creators sufficient to stimulate further innovation. Of course, the IP owners would like to maximize their profit by delaying the return of their creation to the public domain for as long as possible and by restricting the fair use rights of purchasers as much as possible. But no sensible person would argue that IP protection should last forever and that purchasers of IP have no fair use rights. Ultimately, it's a balancing act, but to my mind IP holders should only be given property rights sufficient to stimulate continued innovation; anything further achieves no legitimate social purpose. Applied to the question at hand, the issue becomes will allowing the unlimited free downloading of copyrighted music sufficiently hinder the further creation of music so as to warrant prohibiting, regulating or otherwise limiting such activity. Reasonable minds can differ on that issue and I don't care to enter into a debate at this time but I believe the framework of the debate should be as outlined above and I guess our founding fathers agree with me.
Ultimately, we have to get away from the simple minded belief of "I thought it up and should therefore have absolute ownership rights over my idea". That's never been the law anywhere and is unversally acknowledged to be bad social policy.
Not so in the US. No commercial wind powered generating facility has local storage devices like batteries or any other form. It's not economically feasable with the present technology. The grid acts as a type of storage in that the excess capacity(when the wind is blowing) is transferred to areas that need it and when the wind isn't blowing the grid supplies the local area power. Wind powered generating facilities are becoming a big business in the US and are spearheaded by private companies; i.e. they sell their output to the traditional electric utilities and the government requires the utilities to buy from the wind powered generators but at a cost that reflects the utilities' own generating costs from their tradititonal plants. Wind generators must therefore be cost competitive although there are lots of government regulations/incentives making it more economically attractive. Local storage schemes like batteries are just too expensive and unecessary since they're selling all their output on the grid already, i.e. there is nothing to store.
Both these companies have more than enough cash to finance this litigation for a long time. No one's about to run out of money here. If nothing else, MS and Sun will keep SCO afloat. After a certain point, having more money than your opponent is no advantage. That point has been more than reached here.
It's not about impact at all. It's about the role of a judge in civil litigation. What do you expect a judge to do at a hearing on the propriety of the issuance of a subpoena? All he can do is inquire why you want the subpoena issued and if you can articulate some reasonable basis on why the information you seek is relevant or reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of relevant information the judge should issue the subpoena. To refuse to do so would be a clear abuse of judicial discretion.That's the actual law as you put it. Judges realize this; lawyers realize this; that's why judges wisely refuse to busy themselves with a lot of hearings on proforma motions where they must grant the issuance of the subpoena anyway. The fact is the threshold is so low that any competent lawyer can meet it and any lawyer that abuses the subpoena power risks sanction from the court and possibly loosing his license.
The constitutionality of the DMCA is certainly questionable for the reasons you suggest but that's not the issue I'm speaking to. As a practical matter, the RIAA will plainly be able to meet the limited burden necessary for the issuance of the subpoenae in question. Having the subpoenae issued within the context of a pending case won't change anything and to suggest that it will is simply wrong.
Does anyone know why Mandrake didn't just wait for Kernel 2.6.0?
One word answer=MONEY. The only way they can make any money is by releasing a new product which they do twice a year. Delaying a new release would severely impact their bottom line, particularly when no one knows for sure when 2.6 will be ready.
Only problem is that most, if not all popular artists, have signed away their rights to the recording companies. They have no more right to charge a fee for downloading their music than you.
However, it protects users' privacy and due process rights by requiring the plaintiff (RIAA) to file suit alleging a specific incident of infringement rather than allowing them to go on a "fishing expedition," which is what they (the RIAA) CLAIM the current law allows.
I don't think this provides any protection against a fishing expedition; John Doe suits are frequently just that. It just makes them more costly since you have to hire an attorney and file suit.
I have practiced law for many years in the US and issued probably thousands of subpeonas in civil cases. Let me tell you how it's done. I go down to the court house and pick up a package of subpeona forms from the clerk which are presigned by a judge. I sign the subeonas fill out the necessary info and have them served.I give notice to the other parties in the case that the subpeona has been issued. This is pretty much par for the course in every jurisdiction I've ever been in. The idea of judicial supervision is a joke; judges have neither the time nor the inclinination to have a court hearing on every subpeona issued in all the cases pending before the judge. They trust the lawyers to act responsibly and trust that the opposing parties will come in and complain if someone has gone beserk re issuing subpeonas. At that point the judge will get involved and may sanction the attorney if it appears that the subpoena power has been seriously abused. That's the way it really works.
I'm sure there's a good answer to this, but I don't understand the logic of the Canadian law where you can't make a copy of a cd and give it to your friend but you can give your friend your original cd and he can legally make a copy of it. I assume your friend can turn around and give his copied cd to another friend who could also legally copy it. The only thing that I could come up with is that the law is meant to deter you from making a large number of copies of the cd and distributing them to your friends i.e. it slows down the disribution of copied cds because you have to give the original or a legal copy to everyone that makes a copy. If that's the logic, the Canadian RIAA could argue that the law imposes a condition of a physical transfer of a legal cd as a prerequisite for making a legal copy and since there is no physical transfer in P2P filesharing the activity is illegal..
I know they sued for declaratory relief, but didn't they also include a Count under the Lanham Act? I doubt that could be bounced on justiciability grounds on a motion to dismiss.
As far as the adds go, I didn't ask for it; I don't want it; and I find it offensive to bombarded with adds after volutarily contributing my hard earned money to mandrake by joining the mandrake club. For me it's addware.
Rather than creating strawmen and knocking them down, please look at the facts. The assertion was made that the present instability in Africa was caused by a massive arms infusion by the US during the cold war. No mention was made of the undisputed massive arms infusion into the region by the soviets, or the continuing arms infusion into the region by the Chinese , the North Koreans and by many others willing to trade blood for money. I suppose that could be an oversight but I doubt it. The facts were ignored to make a rhetorical point, i,e, it's all the fault of the US. And that my friend is a crock.
I guess our leftist friends have conveniently forgotten about the butload of arms the Soviet Union poured into Africa during the cold war to support factions favorable to them. And somehow that's not percieved as " setting the stage" for for these conflicts. What a crock.
Unix is just built better. It has a longer history. I'll ceed that perhaps with a larger user base (pretend Unix has 90% market share) it would be a bigger target, but it is *not* as susceptible as Windows is. Not by a large margin.
I agree with most of what you said, but come to a different conclusion. Linux/unix may not be as susceptible, but it is susceptible enough IMHO. It's small comfort to be better than windows in this regard. It's like boasting about who's the world's tallest midget. There's a whole lot of security work remaining for both platforms.
It's standard legalese for all emails/faxes that an attorney sends to a client. The purpose is to preserve the attorney-client priviege in all attorney-client communications. The attorney-client privilege is one that prohibits disclosure of all communications between an attorney and his client. You can waive that privilege by disclosing the attorney-client communication to third parties. This is an attempt to preserve the privilege in the event the communication is misdirected to some third party. It has no relevance to communications that aren't with your client but the biolerplate is usually there on all faxes/emails from a law firm anyway.
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Rh is also the only linux company that stepped up to the plate and sued SCO. SUSE din't seem to eager to do so IIRC.
Your right of course, but I only wish they would be as obsessed with the security of their software.
The priorities in bankruptcy are complicated, whether in Ch7 or Ch11. Secured creditors(usually the company's financing bank) get paid ahead of general usecured creditors. There's usually very little left for unsecureds. In any bankruptcy general unsecured creditors==screwed; they will be lucky to get cents on the dollar. A judgment creditor like the one here is considered a general unsecured creditor till they levy on the assets of the debtor. That's why X10 immediately filed bankruptcy; to prevent the judgemnt creditor from levying on its assets. Also, 90% of Ch11 bankruptcies wind up in liquidation either through conversion of the case to a Ch7 or through the filing of a liquidation plan.
"private equity funding"?? Does anybody else think this deal smells? These guys are just a front for some private investors, i.e. they supposedly solicited the the investment from some third parties after putting together the package for an equity purchase in SCO. I wonder who those third parties are? Well you'll never know because it's a private placement. This is just a device for concealing who is really behind the funding. If your ever able to dig down through the byzantine structure of corporate, partnership and limited partnership entities that are the private investors, I think you know who you'll find at the bottom of the heap; those who have an interest in seeing this litigation continue regardless of its outcome.
Stalling is pretty much par for the course in civil litigation. You send out your written discovery, interrogatories and document production requests.The other side says they need more time and that is negotiated. You finally get your responses which are generally not responsive at all; you argue about that with the other side; if you can't resolve it you file a motion to compel and argue the motion in court; the judge sets a time for the other side to comply. You get further responses from the other side but not full compliance; more negotiations, back to court again for further motions to compel. The judge finally gets fed up with the other side's intansigence and reads them the riot act. It goes on forever and you eventually get what you need. Are judges aware of this game? Sure but judicial tempermant varies greatly on how much they will put up with and their time is limited. They have hundreds of cases to administer and can't really micromanage discovery disputes. Usual disputes for written discovery revolve around vague generalities given in responses and the proponent's desire to have a more specific response. At some point the judge determines that the responses are specific enough and that if you want more specific info you should take the depositons of the opposing party's witnesses which launches another round of evasive answers during questioning of the witnesses. You just have to keep pushing to get what you want and eventually you will but nobody gives it to you; it's generally like pulling teeth. This dance will go on for a long time IMHO.
2. Our present recording artists didn't invent music; they didn't invent rock and roll and they're not paying any royalties to those that did. Their creations are based upon are common human heritage of invention and artistic creation that belongs to all. IP rights, the ownership of ideas, has always been limited in appreciation fo this obious fact. They may have created something new, but they didn't do it in a vacuum. To analogize IP rights to personal or real property rights is to ignore these distinctions which inevitably leads to erroneous conclusions, i.e. "They own it so if you take it your stealing." It's not stealing or theft in any legal sense; it's a violation of the owner's limited property rights granted under our current IP laws, in this case copyright infringement.
3. Once you get past your simple minded approach you can address the real policy issue - what is the best social policy on the IP rights of music copyright holders vs the public's interest in assuring that new innovation is reurned to the public domain from which it was derived. You need look no further than the US Constitution. The only justification for IP protection given is to foster innovation in the arts and sciences, i.e. to grant limited property rights to IP creators sufficient to stimulate further innovation. Of course, the IP owners would like to maximize their profit by delaying the return of their creation to the public domain for as long as possible and by restricting the fair use rights of purchasers as much as possible. But no sensible person would argue that IP protection should last forever and that purchasers of IP have no fair use rights. Ultimately, it's a balancing act, but to my mind IP holders should only be given property rights sufficient to stimulate continued innovation; anything further achieves no legitimate social purpose. Applied to the question at hand, the issue becomes will allowing the unlimited free downloading of copyrighted music sufficiently hinder the further creation of music so as to warrant prohibiting, regulating or otherwise limiting such activity. Reasonable minds can differ on that issue and I don't care to enter into a debate at this time but I believe the framework of the debate should be as outlined above and I guess our founding fathers agree with me.
Ultimately, we have to get away from the simple minded belief of "I thought it up and should therefore have absolute ownership rights over my idea". That's never been the law anywhere and is unversally acknowledged to be bad social policy.
Not so in the US. No commercial wind powered generating facility has local storage devices like batteries or any other form. It's not economically feasable with the present technology. The grid acts as a type of storage in that the excess capacity(when the wind is blowing) is transferred to areas that need it and when the wind isn't blowing the grid supplies the local area power. Wind powered generating facilities are becoming a big business in the US and are spearheaded by private companies; i.e. they sell their output to the traditional electric utilities and the government requires the utilities to buy from the wind powered generators but at a cost that reflects the utilities' own generating costs from their tradititonal plants. Wind generators must therefore be cost competitive although there are lots of government regulations/incentives making it more economically attractive. Local storage schemes like batteries are just too expensive and unecessary since they're selling all their output on the grid already, i.e. there is nothing to store.
Both these companies have more than enough cash to finance this litigation for a long time. No one's about to run out of money here. If nothing else, MS and Sun will keep SCO afloat. After a certain point, having more money than your opponent is no advantage. That point has been more than reached here.
It's not about impact at all. It's about the role of a judge in civil litigation. What do you expect a judge to do at a hearing on the propriety of the issuance of a subpoena? All he can do is inquire why you want the subpoena issued and if you can articulate some reasonable basis on why the information you seek is relevant or reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of relevant information the judge should issue the subpoena. To refuse to do so would be a clear abuse of judicial discretion.That's the actual law as you put it. Judges realize this; lawyers realize this; that's why judges wisely refuse to busy themselves with a lot of hearings on proforma motions where they must grant the issuance of the subpoena anyway. The fact is the threshold is so low that any competent lawyer can meet it and any lawyer that abuses the subpoena power risks sanction from the court and possibly loosing his license. The constitutionality of the DMCA is certainly questionable for the reasons you suggest but that's not the issue I'm speaking to. As a practical matter, the RIAA will plainly be able to meet the limited burden necessary for the issuance of the subpoenae in question. Having the subpoenae issued within the context of a pending case won't change anything and to suggest that it will is simply wrong.
We'll never locate the alien death ray without seti you fool.
Only problem is that most, if not all popular artists, have signed away their rights to the recording companies. They have no more right to charge a fee for downloading their music than you.
Maybe true enough, but microsoft certainly sees open source as a significant threat to its continued success and with good reason; it is.
I have practiced law for many years in the US and issued probably thousands of subpeonas in civil cases. Let me tell you how it's done. I go down to the court house and pick up a package of subpeona forms from the clerk which are presigned by a judge. I sign the subeonas fill out the necessary info and have them served.I give notice to the other parties in the case that the subpeona has been issued. This is pretty much par for the course in every jurisdiction I've ever been in. The idea of judicial supervision is a joke; judges have neither the time nor the inclinination to have a court hearing on every subpeona issued in all the cases pending before the judge. They trust the lawyers to act responsibly and trust that the opposing parties will come in and complain if someone has gone beserk re issuing subpeonas. At that point the judge will get involved and may sanction the attorney if it appears that the subpoena power has been seriously abused. That's the way it really works.
I'm sure there's a good answer to this, but I don't understand the logic of the Canadian law where you can't make a copy of a cd and give it to your friend but you can give your friend your original cd and he can legally make a copy of it. I assume your friend can turn around and give his copied cd to another friend who could also legally copy it. The only thing that I could come up with is that the law is meant to deter you from making a large number of copies of the cd and distributing them to your friends i.e. it slows down the disribution of copied cds because you have to give the original or a legal copy to everyone that makes a copy. If that's the logic, the Canadian RIAA could argue that the law imposes a condition of a physical transfer of a legal cd as a prerequisite for making a legal copy and since there is no physical transfer in P2P filesharing the activity is illegal..
I know they sued for declaratory relief, but didn't they also include a Count under the Lanham Act? I doubt that could be bounced on justiciability grounds on a motion to dismiss.
As far as the adds go, I didn't ask for it; I don't want it; and I find it offensive to bombarded with adds after volutarily contributing my hard earned money to mandrake by joining the mandrake club. For me it's addware.
Rather than creating strawmen and knocking them down, please look at the facts. The assertion was made that the present instability in Africa was caused by a massive arms infusion by the US during the cold war. No mention was made of the undisputed massive arms infusion into the region by the soviets, or the continuing arms infusion into the region by the Chinese , the North Koreans and by many others willing to trade blood for money. I suppose that could be an oversight but I doubt it. The facts were ignored to make a rhetorical point, i,e, it's all the fault of the US. And that my friend is a crock.
I guess our leftist friends have conveniently forgotten about the butload of arms the Soviet Union poured into Africa during the cold war to support factions favorable to them. And somehow that's not percieved as " setting the stage" for for these conflicts. What a crock.
Yeah, but will it run on linux? It had to be said.
That explains phase two of the project: Those who the system has determined have no value will of course be exterminated.
It's standard legalese for all emails/faxes that an attorney sends to a client. The purpose is to preserve the attorney-client priviege in all attorney-client communications. The attorney-client privilege is one that prohibits disclosure of all communications between an attorney and his client. You can waive that privilege by disclosing the attorney-client communication to third parties. This is an attempt to preserve the privilege in the event the communication is misdirected to some third party. It has no relevance to communications that aren't with your client but the biolerplate is usually there on all faxes/emails from a law firm anyway.