Or you might get burned. It's not a far step from "the taxpayers are footing a massive bill" to "we should therefore nationalise the groups getting the money." The UK already has a television license, a music and movie license isn't beyond the pale.
Television broadcasters send their content via transmission paths that they (usually) have complete control over: TV towers, satellites, and cables. Barring the laws of physics breaking down, or some kind of massive jamming event like a nuclear strike, broadcast TV will always work (although there are problems with reflections, ghosting, interference, and so on). Same for satellites, except on certain rainy days. Cables always work, except When Backhoes Attack.
Email and web browsing use an uncontrolled network -- the Internet. Data pass over systems outside the direct control of the provider. You can't reasonably demand the same uptime and QoS. That being said, this particular incident appears to have been a software foul-up under RIM's direct supervision, which should have been preventable.
Missing the point. This was not about the hunt itself, but so DARPA could study the spontaneous social networks that would spring up in response to the challenge. They'll have some really good data on that now, and I'm sure they'll interview the MIT guys carefully.
Last I checked, a copyright gives its owner a monopoly, which is the diametric opposite of a free market. This monopoly is enforced through government regulation. I must have missed your point, unless you were being extremely sarcastic.
Second, this is a newly filed application. The examiner will almost certainly come back with multiple rejections based on obviousness, and the claims will likely be narrowed in response. Like most negotiations, the parties start off with extreme positions and work towards compromise.
And an invention is obvious if it is merely "the predictable use of prior-art elements according to their established functions" to produce an expected result. Thanks, KSR.
There are more of us than you think. I was also on since the launch. I remember the days when all the conversations had people with user IDs in the hundreds, JonKatz, Signal 11, Natalie Portman naked and petrified, the underpants gnomes, and I had hot grits poured down my pants on several occasions. Now get off my lawn.
I know everyone here likes to armchair quarterback, but designing a proper voting system is Really Hard (tm). I attended a workshop put on by Ron Rivest about a year ago (details here), and had dinner with him afterward. I wish I had been taking notes because I don't remember all the details, but at least one salient point stuck with me.
One the one hand, you want a system that prevents voting coercion: "Vote for who I tell you or I'll break your legs." That's a strong reason why we give people privacy when they vote (the secret ballot). On the other hand, you want a system that prevents fraud by allowing a voter to make sure her vote was counted in the final tally. But here's the catch: you can't give the voter a receipt, or in fact anything that can be used (even theoretically) to recover a list of the candidates they voted for, because coercion now becomes "Give me the receipt/token/URL/whatever or I'll break your legs." Reconciling these two requirements is a Really Hard Problem, and there are smart people (like Dr. Rivest) who are working on it. In fact, he presented a few really innovative but embryonic solutions at the workshop, including a kind of hashing scheme that can even defeat on-site source code tampering.
Until these problems are solved, we won't be able to trust ANY voting system code, regardless whether it's open source or not. So while it's important that the Sequoia source code was released, please try to have some perspective.
The disclosure on which the claims of this patent are based was filed with the patent office at least as early as Apr. 2, 2001, and maybe as early as Sept. 14, 1998. Always check the cross-reference data, grasshopper.
Big pharma would cry bloody murder, since it costs about a billion dollars to bring a single drug to market through theoretical research, synthesis, isolation, pharmacology, clinical trials, more clinical trials, and final FDA marketing approval.
The government should not be able to obtain your personal credit cards numbers from a 3rd party without first getting a warrant from a judge.
Your fingerprint is personal. Your DNA is personal. Your credit card numbers are not personal, they are assigned to you by a large, multinational corporation that lobbies the government for things like overlooking large executive pay packages.
For years the Supreme Court had little to say with reference to excessive fines. In an early case, it held that it had no appellate jurisdiction to revise the sentence of an inferior court, even though the excessiveness of the fines was apparent on the face of the record.29 In a dissent, Justice Brandeis once contended that the denial of second-class mailing privileges to a newspaper on the basis of its past conduct imposed additional mailing cost, a fine in effect, which, since the costs grew indefinitely each day, was an unusual punishment proscribed by this Amendment.30 The Court has elected to deal with the issue of fines levied upon indigents, resulting in imprisonment upon inability to pay, in terms of the equal protection clause,31 thus obviating any necessity to develop the meaning of "excessive fines" as applied to the person sentenced. So too, the Court has held the Clause inapplicable to civil jury awards of punitive damages in cases between private parties, "when the government neither has prosecuted the action nor has any right to receive a share of the damages awarded."32 The Court based this conclusion on a review of the history and purposes of the Excessive Fines Clause. At the time the Eighth Amendment was adopted, the Court noted, "the word 'fine' was understood to mean a payment to a sovereign as punishment for some offense."33 The Eighth Amendment itself, as were antecedents of the Clause in the Virginia Declaration of Rights and in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, "clearly was adopted with the particular intent of placing limits on the powers of the new government."34 Therefore, while leaving open the issues of whether the Clause has any applicability to civil penalties or to qui tam actions, the Court determined that "the Excessive Fines Clause was intended to limit only those fines directly imposed by, and payable to, the government."35
There are just so many areas to slam them on. One of the biggest I'd go for is proof of harm.
The law explicitly says you can recover money even if you can't prove there was harm. A crappy law to be sure, but it's the law. Your line of attack is basically saying to the jury "He broke the law but the law isn't fair", which will sound like whining to anyone who doesn't really know or care about copyright infringement (i.e. about 95% of the people out there). The likely reaction to this argument is "life isn't fair, kid". The jury is bored, underpaid, would rather be somewhere else, and probably doesn't care about your moral crusade, no matter how much you do. All they are thinking is "This guy just admitted he did it? Awesome, now I can vote for liability right away and get home tonight in time to be with my family."
Another major one would be to attack the means of getting the information on what was shared and who shared it.
This argument sounds like "I was growing weed in my back yard behind a tall fence where no one could see it, but then those lousy cops flew overhead in an airplane. That's not fair!" Again, essentially an admission of guilt, and whining.
Look the guy broke the law, and everyone knew it. Even people here knew it. If you're going to do what they did in the sixties and break the law on purpose, you should expect what the civil rights protesters did -- getting harassed and losing court cases. It's time to man up, accept responsibility for your actions, and stop whining.
(c) Nature of required deposit.
...
(2) In the case of certain works, the special provisions set forth in this clause shall apply. In any case where this clause specifies that one copy or phonorecord may be submitted, that copy or phonorecord shall represent the best edition, or the work as first published, as set forth in paragraph (c)(1) of this section.
...
(vii) Computer programs and databases embodied in machine-readable copies other than CD-ROM format. In cases where a computer program, database, compilation, statistical compendium, or the like, if unpublished is fixed, or if published is published only in the form of machine-readable copies (such as magnetic tape or disks, punched cards, semiconductor chip products, or the like) other than a CD-ROM format, from which the work cannot ordinarily be perceived except with the aid of a machine or device, the deposit shall consist of:
(A) For published or unpublished computer programs, one copy of identifying portions of the program, reproduced in a form visually perceptible without the aid of a machine or device, either on paper or in microform. For these purposes "identifying portions" shall mean one of the following:
( 1 ) The first and last 25 pages or equivalent units of the source code if reproduced on paper, or at least the first and last 25 pages or equivalent units of the source code if reproduced in microform, together with the page or equivalent unit containing the copyright notice, if any. If the program is 50 pages or less, the required deposit will be the entire source code. In the case of revised versions of computer programs, if the revisions occur throughout the entire program, the deposit of the page containing the copyright notice and the first and last 25 pages of source code will suffice; if the revisions do not occur in the first and last 25 pages, the deposit should consist of the page containing the copyright notice and any 50 pages of source code representative of the revised material; or
( 2 ) Where the program contains trade secret material, the page or equivalent unit containing the copyright notice, if any, plus one of the following: the first and last 25 pages or equivalent units of source code with portions of the source code containing trade secrets blocked-out, provided that the blocked-out portions are proportionately less than the material remaining, and the deposit reveals an appreciable amount of original computer code; or the first and last 10 pages or equivalent units of source code alone with no blocked-out portions; or the first and last 25 pages of object code, together with any 10 or more consecutive pages of source code with no blocked-out portions; or for programs consisting of, or less than, 50 pages or equivalent units, entire source code with the trade secret portions blocked-out, provided that the blocked-out portions are proportionately less than the material remaining, and the remaining portion reveals an appreciable amount of original computer code. If the copyright claim is in a revision not contained in the first and last 25 pages, the deposit shall consist of either 20 pages of source code representative of the revised material with no blocked-out portions, or any 50 pages of source code representative of the revised material with portions of the source code containing trade secrets blocked-out, provided that the blocked-out portions are proportinately less than the material remaining and the deposit reveals an appreciable amount of original computer code. Whatever method is used to block out trade secret material, at least an appreciable amount of original computer code must remain visible.
It's stories like these that made me go to law school. I am now a practicing patent attorney. And I have to say, the entrenched interests are very strong. Most patent attorneys support strong patent rights, because they earn their daily bread by convincing their clients that their services are actually valuable. This often translates into political advocacy for strong patent rights, with the consequent effect on business that's been rehashed here countless times.
However, there are groups of us fighting the good fight for balanced patent laws in generalized trade organizations like the American Bar Association and the state bars. Other organizations whose charters are specific to "intellectual property" (like AIPLA) tend to be much more pro-patent and pro-copyright, for obvious reasons.
I don't know about architecture cases, but Congress considered your argument, and explicitly rejected it:
(a) In General.-- Except as otherwise provided by this title, an infringer of copyright is liable for either--
(1) the copyright owner's actual damages and any additional profits of the infringer, as provided by subsection (b); or
(2) statutory damages, as provided by subsection (c).
17 USC 504. Subsection (c) provides, for each copyrighted "work", for a recovery of between $750 and $30,000. The minimum can be lowered to $200 if the "infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright", and the maximum can be raised to $150,000 if the infringement was "willful". With all the copyright articles on slashdot, I'm surprised I have to keep repeating this.
Thomas's lawyers could show that (1) Congress exceeded their constitutional authority in passing this law, or (2) that the law shouldn't apply in her case. The first is a very high hill to climb, since (despite what you might hear about activist judges) the federal courts are very deferential to the political wranglings that go into creating laws. That said, the law was written in different times, when today's primary mode of infringement hadn't even been contemplated. The second approach might get some traction, but it wouldn't help anyone else. Other defendants would still have to make the same "this law doesn't apply to ME" argument.
Sometimes people just need a reminder that there is no grouping of people with less principles than Lawyers.
I'm sure Lawrence Lessig, Eben Moglin, Larry Rosen, and even NYCL would be glad to hear that. Oh wait, you just mean lawyers who fight for people you disagree with?
Last week I was in Washington for business. As I was checking thru security at DCA, where they have these things, I was selected to be body scanned. I refused, saying "You are welcome to frisk me, but I'm not getting in that machine." Apparently, that caught the TSA guy off guard, he had me repeat it. They had me walk through it quickly anyway (to get to the security area), and they patted me down.
Of course, I'm not a terrorist, but I made a point of complaining loudly about the machine. If they get enough people complaining, maybe they'll get the hint.
I also made a point not to antagonize the TSA guys, they're just drones doing their job, and I had better things to do than sit in detention getting questioned. If you try something like this, let them know up front that you consent to be searched (for airline security purposes). Notice the order of the words in my refusal.
There are two kinds of "burden of proof": the burden to persuade, and the burden to produce evidence. The plaintiff doesn't always have the burden of proof, for example the defendant has the burden of persuasion with respect to affirmative defenses, such as fair use in a copyright case. To require the plaintiff to prove a defense would be nonsensical.
The two burdens are not always aligned, either. Suppose a defendant makes a motion to dismiss the case. Then the plaintiff may have the burden to produce some evidence that the case should not be dismissed. The burden to produce evidence is on the plaintiff, but the burden of persuading the judge that the case should be thrown out remains with the defendant, after all the evidence has been presented.
The burden of the showing varies, depending on the situation. Since throwing out a case even before discovery could severely impact a legitimate plaintiff's rights, the burden of production is very low to overcome a motion to dismiss. As the process moves forward, and both sides have more of a chance to be heard, the burden to proceed increases slightly (in the interests of judicial efficiency).
Slashdot Mirror
Or you might get burned. It's not a far step from "the taxpayers are footing a massive bill" to "we should therefore nationalise the groups getting the money." The UK already has a television license, a music and movie license isn't beyond the pale.
Television broadcasters send their content via transmission paths that they (usually) have complete control over: TV towers, satellites, and cables. Barring the laws of physics breaking down, or some kind of massive jamming event like a nuclear strike, broadcast TV will always work (although there are problems with reflections, ghosting, interference, and so on). Same for satellites, except on certain rainy days. Cables always work, except When Backhoes Attack.
Email and web browsing use an uncontrolled network -- the Internet. Data pass over systems outside the direct control of the provider. You can't reasonably demand the same uptime and QoS. That being said, this particular incident appears to have been a software foul-up under RIM's direct supervision, which should have been preventable.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html
Missing the point. This was not about the hunt itself, but so DARPA could study the spontaneous social networks that would spring up in response to the challenge. They'll have some really good data on that now, and I'm sure they'll interview the MIT guys carefully.
Last I checked, a copyright gives its owner a monopoly, which is the diametric opposite of a free market. This monopoly is enforced through government regulation. I must have missed your point, unless you were being extremely sarcastic.
Second, this is a newly filed application. The examiner will almost certainly come back with multiple rejections based on obviousness, and the claims will likely be narrowed in response. Like most negotiations, the parties start off with extreme positions and work towards compromise.
And an invention is obvious if it is merely "the predictable use of prior-art elements according to their established functions" to produce an expected result. Thanks, KSR.
I have ever seen a headline that used a third derivative.
There are more of us than you think. I was also on since the launch. I remember the days when all the conversations had people with user IDs in the hundreds, JonKatz, Signal 11, Natalie Portman naked and petrified, the underpants gnomes, and I had hot grits poured down my pants on several occasions. Now get off my lawn.
I know everyone here likes to armchair quarterback, but designing a proper voting system is Really Hard (tm). I attended a workshop put on by Ron Rivest about a year ago (details here), and had dinner with him afterward. I wish I had been taking notes because I don't remember all the details, but at least one salient point stuck with me.
One the one hand, you want a system that prevents voting coercion: "Vote for who I tell you or I'll break your legs." That's a strong reason why we give people privacy when they vote (the secret ballot). On the other hand, you want a system that prevents fraud by allowing a voter to make sure her vote was counted in the final tally. But here's the catch: you can't give the voter a receipt, or in fact anything that can be used (even theoretically) to recover a list of the candidates they voted for, because coercion now becomes "Give me the receipt/token/URL/whatever or I'll break your legs." Reconciling these two requirements is a Really Hard Problem, and there are smart people (like Dr. Rivest) who are working on it. In fact, he presented a few really innovative but embryonic solutions at the workshop, including a kind of hashing scheme that can even defeat on-site source code tampering.
Until these problems are solved, we won't be able to trust ANY voting system code, regardless whether it's open source or not. So while it's important that the Sequoia source code was released, please try to have some perspective.
The disclosure on which the claims of this patent are based was filed with the patent office at least as early as Apr. 2, 2001, and maybe as early as Sept. 14, 1998. Always check the cross-reference data, grasshopper.
He can report this attempted crime to the FBI Cybercrime office and they will take care of everything!
Banks should be allowed to risk according to whatever model they like. Banks should also be allowed to fail when those risks don't pan out.
Choose carefully.
Big pharma would cry bloody murder, since it costs about a billion dollars to bring a single drug to market through theoretical research, synthesis, isolation, pharmacology, clinical trials, more clinical trials, and final FDA marketing approval.
Also, we signed an international agreement saying we wouldn't.
The government should not be able to obtain your personal credit cards numbers from a 3rd party without first getting a warrant from a judge.
Your fingerprint is personal. Your DNA is personal. Your credit card numbers are not personal, they are assigned to you by a large, multinational corporation that lobbies the government for things like overlooking large executive pay packages.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/amdt8_user.html
The law explicitly says you can recover money even if you can't prove there was harm. A crappy law to be sure, but it's the law. Your line of attack is basically saying to the jury "He broke the law but the law isn't fair", which will sound like whining to anyone who doesn't really know or care about copyright infringement (i.e. about 95% of the people out there). The likely reaction to this argument is "life isn't fair, kid". The jury is bored, underpaid, would rather be somewhere else, and probably doesn't care about your moral crusade, no matter how much you do. All they are thinking is "This guy just admitted he did it? Awesome, now I can vote for liability right away and get home tonight in time to be with my family."
This argument sounds like "I was growing weed in my back yard behind a tall fence where no one could see it, but then those lousy cops flew overhead in an airplane. That's not fair!" Again, essentially an admission of guilt, and whining. Look the guy broke the law, and everyone knew it. Even people here knew it. If you're going to do what they did in the sixties and break the law on purpose, you should expect what the civil rights protesters did -- getting harassed and losing court cases. It's time to man up, accept responsibility for your actions, and stop whining.
It's stories like these that made me go to law school. I am now a practicing patent attorney. And I have to say, the entrenched interests are very strong. Most patent attorneys support strong patent rights, because they earn their daily bread by convincing their clients that their services are actually valuable. This often translates into political advocacy for strong patent rights, with the consequent effect on business that's been rehashed here countless times.
However, there are groups of us fighting the good fight for balanced patent laws in generalized trade organizations like the American Bar Association and the state bars. Other organizations whose charters are specific to "intellectual property" (like AIPLA) tend to be much more pro-patent and pro-copyright, for obvious reasons.
17 USC 504. Subsection (c) provides, for each copyrighted "work", for a recovery of between $750 and $30,000. The minimum can be lowered to $200 if the "infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright", and the maximum can be raised to $150,000 if the infringement was "willful". With all the copyright articles on slashdot, I'm surprised I have to keep repeating this.
Thomas's lawyers could show that (1) Congress exceeded their constitutional authority in passing this law, or (2) that the law shouldn't apply in her case. The first is a very high hill to climb, since (despite what you might hear about activist judges) the federal courts are very deferential to the political wranglings that go into creating laws. That said, the law was written in different times, when today's primary mode of infringement hadn't even been contemplated. The second approach might get some traction, but it wouldn't help anyone else. Other defendants would still have to make the same "this law doesn't apply to ME" argument.
If someone gave you $10,000 gift card it'd be a gift. They paid the taxes when they bought it.
Sales tax != income tax.
Sometimes people just need a reminder that there is no grouping of people with less principles than Lawyers.
I'm sure Lawrence Lessig, Eben Moglin, Larry Rosen, and even NYCL would be glad to hear that. Oh wait, you just mean lawyers who fight for people you disagree with?
Last week I was in Washington for business. As I was checking thru security at DCA, where they have these things, I was selected to be body scanned. I refused, saying "You are welcome to frisk me, but I'm not getting in that machine." Apparently, that caught the TSA guy off guard, he had me repeat it. They had me walk through it quickly anyway (to get to the security area), and they patted me down.
Of course, I'm not a terrorist, but I made a point of complaining loudly about the machine. If they get enough people complaining, maybe they'll get the hint.
I also made a point not to antagonize the TSA guys, they're just drones doing their job, and I had better things to do than sit in detention getting questioned. If you try something like this, let them know up front that you consent to be searched (for airline security purposes). Notice the order of the words in my refusal.
There are two kinds of "burden of proof": the burden to persuade, and the burden to produce evidence. The plaintiff doesn't always have the burden of proof, for example the defendant has the burden of persuasion with respect to affirmative defenses, such as fair use in a copyright case. To require the plaintiff to prove a defense would be nonsensical.
The two burdens are not always aligned, either. Suppose a defendant makes a motion to dismiss the case. Then the plaintiff may have the burden to produce some evidence that the case should not be dismissed. The burden to produce evidence is on the plaintiff, but the burden of persuading the judge that the case should be thrown out remains with the defendant, after all the evidence has been presented.
The burden of the showing varies, depending on the situation. Since throwing out a case even before discovery could severely impact a legitimate plaintiff's rights, the burden of production is very low to overcome a motion to dismiss. As the process moves forward, and both sides have more of a chance to be heard, the burden to proceed increases slightly (in the interests of judicial efficiency).
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html
If only I could say the same for our Chief Justice...