It wasn't cited, the jury foreman was unsure of a specific phrase and used wikipedia to look it up. Honest mistake. Her proper course of action probably would have been to ask the judge to provide some literature about it instead of going out on her own to get it.
"Probably"? A standard piece of jury instruction is that if any member of the jury has any questions whatsoever, even about what appears to be a very simple matter, that they should ask the judge for clarification. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia per se - if she'd done her own research at the library, in an encyclopedia, or even in a dictionary, she'd be similarly tainted (legally).
Apple provides lots of API access to play videos. The whole Quicktime system (as opposed to the app) is based on that one notion, and was one of the earliest public champions of H.264. But that's irrelevant since we're talking about Windows - which also provides lovingly documented ways to use its freely available video APIs. As to your phishing comment - WTF does that have to do with anything, even if it made sense?
And saying that providing your own video codecs (and for that matter your own drop down menus is harder than using an OS API is just plain wrong, as any developer will tell you.
Because Firefox isn't a good citizen and tries to reinvent shit that the underlying OS already provides, like video codecs. Sorry, but its true - this is not the job of the browser. Or at least it shouldn't be, and in every modern OS and every other modern web-browser, this relationship is very well understood - the OS provides a graphical framework, the applications use it.
And sorry, but Firefox wanting to provide a common experience over multiple OSs is a complete crap excuse. It might as well provide its own clipboard and font renderer then...
There is already a legal distinction between wholesale and retail transactions. The latter is subject to sales tax; the former is not. I don't think that would require a novel legal theory. If you needed one, they'd write "one per customer per day" into the contract, or something like that. I don't think it would be difficult.
Not true, I'm afraid. If you purchase something in the US for resale and prove documentation to the seller that shows that you're going to resell them, the State generally allows them to defer the collection of sales tax on those items. More accurately, the merchant is required to either collect sales tax or adequate documentation allowing the State to track purchases to someone else on every sale.
That has NOTHING to do with what happens between two private parties. Hell, Costco could, in this case, choose to pay taxes on the product - although typically those don't apply if you're then exporting them since you pay export duties instead.
You seem to be confusing contract terms, which may be binding between two individuals (or corporations), and laws, which are enforced by the State. That's the root of this issue - that this should have been purely a contract matter between Omega and the people it directly deals with (that could have follow-on requirements, naturally), for which penalties for violating the contract are spelled out in the civil documents, and laws which are passed by the State for the protection, generally, of the State or its citizens. This is a case where the law is being used to protect the profits of a non-resident company.
You stop brute force through limitations on attempts, and you stop hash reversal through salts. All the problems are failures to implement one of these two simple steps.
And rather than adding locks, the easy thing to do is to keep track of how many bad password guesses have happened since the last good password, and pause that many seconds (or even 1/10 as long) before responding, with a maximum pause of 10 seconds or so. Not very obvious to your users, never makes them call support to unlock an account, and totally frustrates an automated attacker.
Yup - ordered lunch online for pickup today and it asked me for a username and password in case I, you know, forget my address in the future or something. Actually not even that since it was pickup, not delivery.
If you don't make someone authenticate themselves over the phone, why would you ever do it just because they're on a computer? And don't give me "remembering data" crap - browsers can and do autofill name and address just fine, but now the user has to go through registration the first time, then the second time 4 months later (because they forgot), then you won't let them use the same email address because it already has an account so they have to wait for an email to reset a password they didn't want...
Oh, never mind, they'll just order from somebody else. Much easier.
Which is why you lie. Consistently and constantly to those questions.
What was your birth place? Pizza Hut, Luna City What was your first pet's name? Sir Fucks-a-lot What was your mother's maiden name? Jack Daniels What is your favorite food? Glass
If you do so, no amount of digging into your personal life is going to come up with the right answers and as long as you give the same answers each time, it's not that difficult to remember.
Of course, then you have the problem where THAT database is compromised, given unlike the password data base the answers probably weren't encrypted...
Yup. The only way someone could ever get them is if you posted the list of questions and answers to some kind of non-anonymous messaging board. Luckily, nobody would eve be that foolish.;)
US copyright law says nothing about personal import. What it does say is that the anyone who imports a product and then sells it can only legally do so if they have permission from the local copyright holder to import the work.
Er, take another look at what you just wrote, please. Your second sentence totally contradicts your first sentence. If you ("anyone" in your 2nd sentence language) buy a book while on holiday and then get on a plane to go home ("imports a product"), then by this logic you're not allowed to resell it at your local used bookstore without a signed permission slip from the publisher's Mom.
Still not sounding crazy to you? Nothing in the law says, "Oh, unless its jonwil or someone else who just wants to do it, then its fine." And if it did, that'd be a problem too.
Define retail, then. If Costco can pay the same price that John Q. Xian on the street pays and still make money doing so, its going to be really hard to come up with an enforcable contract that prevents CD from allowing them to do so. Otherwise you have a manufacturer telling a distributor (possibly then telling a retailer) that they can't sell too many watches, even if they're selling them at MSRP for cash money.
Weird, huh.
For all I know that's what they're doing to mislead a scrupulous dealer, the way meth labs have networks of people to acquire sudafed despite legal restrictions. But I'd still call it a dick move, the sort of thing that gives us anti-sudafed laws in the first place.
The anti-sudafed laws were designed to prevent the illegal manufacture of drugs, which happens to be a felony (as do various aiding-and-abetting laws). This is designed to promote maximum profit for a foreign company. See the difference?
the "authorized distributor" is anyone authorized by the local copyright holder to import the copyrighted work.
Were you explicitly authorized by the publisher of the last book you purchased to take it home? No? Why not? Oh, that's right, because there's no legal reason for them to do so. Ever travel with a book overseas on a plane? Were you sued? Of course not - there's no legal reason for anyone to do so.
The history of commerce also revolves around contracts, and having some mechanism of enforcing them. In the wide wide world of international trading, that doesn't always hold.
There is one kind of fairness in places where contracts are enforced, and another kind where they aren't. Commerce is generally a lot slower in the latter, but it's "fair" in its way.
Costco is trying to play both sides of that fence. As you say, that's just arbitrage, but in doing so they're taking the kind of fair that happens in contract-less countries and importing it into the ones where contracts are enforceable. It's not just arbitrage, but arbitrage to skirt the rules.
In other words, it's fair only in the sense that nothing is unfair when there are no rules. That's why I said it was unfair.
But where's the contract violation? Omega sells watches to a Chinese distributor (call them CD), presumably with a minimum price floor that they're allowed to resell at. Perfectly legal. Costco then buys them from that distributor at the price agreed-upon between Omega and CD. Still no contract violations. Costco then sells the watches in the US at a higher price.
Note that Costco never had a contract with Omega. Omega is well within their rights to withhold any bonuses that normally come along with the watch (for example, not offering extended warranties to consumers who purchase the watch at Costco since Costco isn't an Omega-preferred-reseller). Very legitimate, and a good idea for Omega since it adds value to those resellers who are preferred.
All contracts (and they existed at every step of the process) were honored, every transaction was 100% above board. But now the US Government is stepping in to say, "No, wait, a foreign company didn't make as much money as they wanted to, so let's find a technicality on which this can be made illegal." That's what I have a problem with.
...[T]hey don't like it when items get moved between markets.
This is very true. It begs the question though as to whether its in the best interest of the citizens of the United States for our country to allow the preference of a foreign corporation to make lots of money to become binding law that affects the residents of this country?
Heck, I don't like it when people get better deals than I want them to do when I sell stuff on Craigslist. That doesn't mean that the US should enforce my pricing scheme.
Sounds like they should stop selling their product cheaply to other distributors then - redress which is completely within their rights and within their abilities.
That's perfectly normal in Australia. For specialty items (such as watches or cameras), US MSRP is often less than half of the Australian price (in US dollars). As we're talking high markup, low manufacturing cost (relative to purchase price) goods, it's to be expected that the manufacturers will try to optimise pricing for each local market to maximise profit.
It should also be expected that other mercantile traders will capitalize on this disparity, perform arbitrage, and profit (albeit less so) on their work. That's how trading (and ultimately all commerce) works, plain and simple.
And while the copyright argument is frankly bizarre, it may not actually necessarily be unfair. Omega sold the watches to the Chinese distributor with the intent that they be sold cheaper overseas, since presumably they maximize profits there by selling 1,000 watches at $300 than 200 watches at $1,000. And presumably they made the Chinese distributor promise to sell them only to consumers, but being in China, they can't enforce that.
The entire history of commerce (especially in a capitalist society) revolves around the idea of arbirtrage - buying something where its cheap, possibly doing things to it, moving it somewhere else, and selling it for more money.
So... a retailer purchasing a product from a (foreign) distributor/manufacturer is treated differently from an individual buying from a retailer?
Yeah, but the difference isn't just between retailers and individuals, it is between authorized distributors and everyone else.
But an "authorized distributor" isn't a legal concept, outside of making sure that there weren't any contract violations between two private entities. Now I have to figure out whether or not a retailer is on a list maintained by a distributor (with no legal agreement that the list be made public, since its just a private contract summary) to know whether or not I have ownership of an item I purchase from said retailer?
That's just crazy.
Its fine if the distributor doesn't want to honor a warranty - that's a case of the distributor saying, "Hey, if you buy this from someone on this list, we'll give you a free 2 year warranty, but if not, we won't." Perfectly legal contract with terms between two private parties, and I don't have to take the deal if I don't want to (I can just choose not to return it to the distributor if it breaks). Very different than restricting my rights to sell property. Very, very different.
Well, for several years I was employed as a programmer, who wrote computer programs as a means of making money. Of course, those programs are all GPLed, and so the issue of people downloading unauthorized copies is pretty much moot (unless, of course, the person they download it from refuses to grant them access to the source code...). I do not get emotional about the issue of people downloading software even when the software is not GPLed.
Of course, without Copyright I could always take your GPLd code, copy it perfectly, and release it under a different less restrictive license. Since the only power granted to me by the GPL (and thus the only incentive to "take the deal") is that of copying, in a Copyright-free land the GPL is 100% moot....
Can we keep seperate types of art seperate? There is no need to unify everything, just for the sake of doing it. The Mona Lisa is a great painting, I'm sure a novel about it would suck..
Ah, so you're familiar with Dan Brown's work then?
And here we are talking about only video games. What about "Chess, the movie" and "Chess II, return of the King."
I take it that you've never seen Chess: The Musical? Quite good, actually - Nobody's Side is one of my favorite songs. You've probably at least heard One Night in Bangkok before (aka: the song that financed the musical, in popular mythology at least).
Is Hollywood again going to disrespect fans who, in this case, have as much right to see a good plot respected as readers of The Lord of The Rings?
Wha? Did you really compare a recent pop-culture video game to a book series that's enjoyed over 150 million copies sold over the last 56 years? I personally feel that it probably does deserve better than its likely to get, but saying that its an epic structure worthy of the same respect that one of the seminal works of modern fiction received is just plain silly.
Ah, so you're one of those "there are people in California, and people in a couple of cities going down the eastern coastline, and nothing else counts" sorts, huh?
His statement is pretty spot on -- there are some pretty wide swaths in this country where you've either got low population density or geographical problems making it difficult. Look at Appalachia as a whole, for example -- a good chunk of it is "difficult" geographically, and having a significant percentage of the populace nestled in mountain hollows doesn't help.
Ah - you'll be happy to know then that we don't actually have a significant percentage of the US population nestled in mountain hollows. And in other good news, it turns out that the existence of Appalachian Mountain Dancers doesn't necessarily preclude the good people of Manhattan from having blazingly fast high speed internet access.
For my next trick, I'll show how letting two gay men get married to each other shouldn't cause millions of straight people to get divorced.
I think the best way to think of an animal vs plant argument is something like this: An animal can move anywhere it wants, independent of the ground below it. A plant, however, is stuck to the ground it was born in. If it were to leave the ground, it would almost certainly die. Very simplistic, but it covers everything i can think of.
Most algae would have difficulty with that classification. As would most basement dwellers, for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't cited, the jury foreman was unsure of a specific phrase and used wikipedia to look it up. Honest mistake. Her proper course of action probably would have been to ask the judge to provide some literature about it instead of going out on her own to get it.
"Probably"? A standard piece of jury instruction is that if any member of the jury has any questions whatsoever, even about what appears to be a very simple matter, that they should ask the judge for clarification. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia per se - if she'd done her own research at the library, in an encyclopedia, or even in a dictionary, she'd be similarly tainted (legally).
Sorry, but that's just bull.
Apple provides lots of API access to play videos. The whole Quicktime system (as opposed to the app) is based on that one notion, and was one of the earliest public champions of H.264. But that's irrelevant since we're talking about Windows - which also provides lovingly documented ways to use its freely available video APIs. As to your phishing comment - WTF does that have to do with anything, even if it made sense?
And saying that providing your own video codecs (and for that matter your own drop down menus is harder than using an OS API is just plain wrong, as any developer will tell you.
Because Firefox isn't a good citizen and tries to reinvent shit that the underlying OS already provides, like video codecs. Sorry, but its true - this is not the job of the browser. Or at least it shouldn't be, and in every modern OS and every other modern web-browser, this relationship is very well understood - the OS provides a graphical framework, the applications use it.
And sorry, but Firefox wanting to provide a common experience over multiple OSs is a complete crap excuse. It might as well provide its own clipboard and font renderer then...
There is already a legal distinction between wholesale and retail transactions. The latter is subject to sales tax; the former is not. I don't think that would require a novel legal theory. If you needed one, they'd write "one per customer per day" into the contract, or something like that. I don't think it would be difficult.
Not true, I'm afraid. If you purchase something in the US for resale and prove documentation to the seller that shows that you're going to resell them, the State generally allows them to defer the collection of sales tax on those items. More accurately, the merchant is required to either collect sales tax or adequate documentation allowing the State to track purchases to someone else on every sale.
That has NOTHING to do with what happens between two private parties. Hell, Costco could, in this case, choose to pay taxes on the product - although typically those don't apply if you're then exporting them since you pay export duties instead.
You seem to be confusing contract terms, which may be binding between two individuals (or corporations), and laws, which are enforced by the State. That's the root of this issue - that this should have been purely a contract matter between Omega and the people it directly deals with (that could have follow-on requirements, naturally), for which penalties for violating the contract are spelled out in the civil documents, and laws which are passed by the State for the protection, generally, of the State or its citizens. This is a case where the law is being used to protect the profits of a non-resident company.
Again I say, "See the difference"?
You stop brute force through limitations on attempts, and you stop hash reversal through salts. All the problems are failures to implement one of these two simple steps.
And rather than adding locks, the easy thing to do is to keep track of how many bad password guesses have happened since the last good password, and pause that many seconds (or even 1/10 as long) before responding, with a maximum pause of 10 seconds or so. Not very obvious to your users, never makes them call support to unlock an account, and totally frustrates an automated attacker.
Yup - ordered lunch online for pickup today and it asked me for a username and password in case I, you know, forget my address in the future or something. Actually not even that since it was pickup, not delivery.
If you don't make someone authenticate themselves over the phone, why would you ever do it just because they're on a computer? And don't give me "remembering data" crap - browsers can and do autofill name and address just fine, but now the user has to go through registration the first time, then the second time 4 months later (because they forgot), then you won't let them use the same email address because it already has an account so they have to wait for an email to reset a password they didn't want...
Oh, never mind, they'll just order from somebody else. Much easier.
Which is why you lie. Consistently and constantly to those questions.
What was your birth place? Pizza Hut, Luna City
What was your first pet's name? Sir Fucks-a-lot
What was your mother's maiden name? Jack Daniels
What is your favorite food? Glass
If you do so, no amount of digging into your personal life is going to come up with the right answers and as long as you give the same answers each time, it's not that difficult to remember.
Of course, then you have the problem where THAT database is compromised, given unlike the password data base the answers probably weren't encrypted...
Yup. The only way someone could ever get them is if you posted the list of questions and answers to some kind of non-anonymous messaging board. Luckily, nobody would eve be that foolish. ;)
You bank without using a Live CD?
Yes, this is the Real World, don't'cha'know, and some people are willing to entertain microscopic risks in exchange for convenience.
US copyright law says nothing about personal import.
What it does say is that the anyone who imports a product and then sells it can only legally do so if they have permission from the local copyright holder to import the work.
Er, take another look at what you just wrote, please. Your second sentence totally contradicts your first sentence. If you ("anyone" in your 2nd sentence language) buy a book while on holiday and then get on a plane to go home ("imports a product"), then by this logic you're not allowed to resell it at your local used bookstore without a signed permission slip from the publisher's Mom.
Still not sounding crazy to you? Nothing in the law says, "Oh, unless its jonwil or someone else who just wants to do it, then its fine." And if it did, that'd be a problem too.
Define retail, then. If Costco can pay the same price that John Q. Xian on the street pays and still make money doing so, its going to be really hard to come up with an enforcable contract that prevents CD from allowing them to do so. Otherwise you have a manufacturer telling a distributor (possibly then telling a retailer) that they can't sell too many watches, even if they're selling them at MSRP for cash money.
Weird, huh.
For all I know that's what they're doing to mislead a scrupulous dealer, the way meth labs have networks of people to acquire sudafed despite legal restrictions. But I'd still call it a dick move, the sort of thing that gives us anti-sudafed laws in the first place.
The anti-sudafed laws were designed to prevent the illegal manufacture of drugs, which happens to be a felony (as do various aiding-and-abetting laws). This is designed to promote maximum profit for a foreign company. See the difference?
the "authorized distributor" is anyone authorized by the local copyright holder to import the copyrighted work.
Were you explicitly authorized by the publisher of the last book you purchased to take it home? No? Why not? Oh, that's right, because there's no legal reason for them to do so. Ever travel with a book overseas on a plane? Were you sued? Of course not - there's no legal reason for anyone to do so.
Same here.
The history of commerce also revolves around contracts, and having some mechanism of enforcing them. In the wide wide world of international trading, that doesn't always hold.
There is one kind of fairness in places where contracts are enforced, and another kind where they aren't. Commerce is generally a lot slower in the latter, but it's "fair" in its way.
Costco is trying to play both sides of that fence. As you say, that's just arbitrage, but in doing so they're taking the kind of fair that happens in contract-less countries and importing it into the ones where contracts are enforceable. It's not just arbitrage, but arbitrage to skirt the rules.
In other words, it's fair only in the sense that nothing is unfair when there are no rules. That's why I said it was unfair.
But where's the contract violation? Omega sells watches to a Chinese distributor (call them CD), presumably with a minimum price floor that they're allowed to resell at. Perfectly legal. Costco then buys them from that distributor at the price agreed-upon between Omega and CD. Still no contract violations. Costco then sells the watches in the US at a higher price.
Note that Costco never had a contract with Omega. Omega is well within their rights to withhold any bonuses that normally come along with the watch (for example, not offering extended warranties to consumers who purchase the watch at Costco since Costco isn't an Omega-preferred-reseller). Very legitimate, and a good idea for Omega since it adds value to those resellers who are preferred.
All contracts (and they existed at every step of the process) were honored, every transaction was 100% above board. But now the US Government is stepping in to say, "No, wait, a foreign company didn't make as much money as they wanted to, so let's find a technicality on which this can be made illegal." That's what I have a problem with.
...[T]hey don't like it when items get moved between markets.
This is very true. It begs the question though as to whether its in the best interest of the citizens of the United States for our country to allow the preference of a foreign corporation to make lots of money to become binding law that affects the residents of this country?
Heck, I don't like it when people get better deals than I want them to do when I sell stuff on Craigslist. That doesn't mean that the US should enforce my pricing scheme.
Sounds like they should stop selling their product cheaply to other distributors then - redress which is completely within their rights and within their abilities.
That's perfectly normal in Australia. For specialty items (such as watches or cameras), US MSRP is often less than half of the Australian price (in US dollars). As we're talking high markup, low manufacturing cost (relative to purchase price) goods, it's to be expected that the manufacturers will try to optimise pricing for each local market to maximise profit.
It should also be expected that other mercantile traders will capitalize on this disparity, perform arbitrage, and profit (albeit less so) on their work. That's how trading (and ultimately all commerce) works, plain and simple.
And while the copyright argument is frankly bizarre, it may not actually necessarily be unfair. Omega sold the watches to the Chinese distributor with the intent that they be sold cheaper overseas, since presumably they maximize profits there by selling 1,000 watches at $300 than 200 watches at $1,000. And presumably they made the Chinese distributor promise to sell them only to consumers, but being in China, they can't enforce that.
The entire history of commerce (especially in a capitalist society) revolves around the idea of arbirtrage - buying something where its cheap, possibly doing things to it, moving it somewhere else, and selling it for more money.
How is that "unfair" exactly?
So... a retailer purchasing a product from a (foreign) distributor/manufacturer is treated differently from an individual buying from a retailer?
Yeah, but the difference isn't just between retailers and individuals, it is between authorized distributors and everyone else.
But an "authorized distributor" isn't a legal concept, outside of making sure that there weren't any contract violations between two private entities. Now I have to figure out whether or not a retailer is on a list maintained by a distributor (with no legal agreement that the list be made public, since its just a private contract summary) to know whether or not I have ownership of an item I purchase from said retailer?
That's just crazy.
Its fine if the distributor doesn't want to honor a warranty - that's a case of the distributor saying, "Hey, if you buy this from someone on this list, we'll give you a free 2 year warranty, but if not, we won't." Perfectly legal contract with terms between two private parties, and I don't have to take the deal if I don't want to (I can just choose not to return it to the distributor if it breaks). Very different than restricting my rights to sell property. Very, very different.
Well, for several years I was employed as a programmer, who wrote computer programs as a means of making money. Of course, those programs are all GPLed, and so the issue of people downloading unauthorized copies is pretty much moot (unless, of course, the person they download it from refuses to grant them access to the source code...). I do not get emotional about the issue of people downloading software even when the software is not GPLed.
Of course, without Copyright I could always take your GPLd code, copy it perfectly, and release it under a different less restrictive license. Since the only power granted to me by the GPL (and thus the only incentive to "take the deal") is that of copying, in a Copyright-free land the GPL is 100% moot....
It would probably do well. See Julie & Julia for a pretty good treatment of another unlikely popular source - cooking blogs.
Can we keep seperate types of art seperate? There is no need to unify everything, just for the sake of doing it. The Mona Lisa is a great painting, I'm sure a novel about it would suck..
Ah, so you're familiar with Dan Brown's work then?
And here we are talking about only video games. What about "Chess, the movie" and "Chess II, return of the King."
I take it that you've never seen Chess: The Musical? Quite good, actually - Nobody's Side is one of my favorite songs. You've probably at least heard One Night in Bangkok before (aka: the song that financed the musical, in popular mythology at least).
Wha? Did you really compare a recent pop-culture video game to a book series that's enjoyed over 150 million copies sold over the last 56 years? I personally feel that it probably does deserve better than its likely to get, but saying that its an epic structure worthy of the same respect that one of the seminal works of modern fiction received is just plain silly.
Ah, so you're one of those "there are people in California, and people in a couple of cities going down the eastern coastline, and nothing else counts" sorts, huh?
His statement is pretty spot on -- there are some pretty wide swaths in this country where you've either got low population density or geographical problems making it difficult. Look at Appalachia as a whole, for example -- a good chunk of it is "difficult" geographically, and having a significant percentage of the populace nestled in mountain hollows doesn't help.
Ah - you'll be happy to know then that we don't actually have a significant percentage of the US population nestled in mountain hollows. And in other good news, it turns out that the existence of Appalachian Mountain Dancers doesn't necessarily preclude the good people of Manhattan from having blazingly fast high speed internet access.
For my next trick, I'll show how letting two gay men get married to each other shouldn't cause millions of straight people to get divorced.
True.
I think the best way to think of an animal vs plant argument is something like this:
An animal can move anywhere it wants, independent of the ground below it.
A plant, however, is stuck to the ground it was born in. If it were to leave the ground, it would almost certainly die.
Very simplistic, but it covers everything i can think of.
Most algae would have difficulty with that classification. As would most basement dwellers, for that matter.
Because genetically engineering your population to gather solar energy is cheaper than feeding them.
You could look at it as the ultimate application of the "teach a man to fish" principle, I suppose.