The performer of a song has a copyright protecting that performance, although obvs. not in the underlying song. Unlike a songwriter (who cannot block covers because of the compulsory license) a performer can block reproduction of the performance.
So it seems as if Prince is acting within his rights to assert a copyright over the performance, at least under U.S. law. Whether that copyright trumps fair use, etc., I don't know. But it's not correct to say that Prince has no copyright because he didn't write the song.
Like most Slashdotters, I hate the DMCA, and I think it's madness for Prince to try to block this stuff, since it's good advertising and he'll sell more albums if he doesn't, but there it is.
The right way to do it, of course, is to have the human from the security department leave this message: To call us back, call the number on your card; then, immediately enter the following code to be directed to the right department. But they still haven't learned.
But since they're checking the card isn't stolen, they can't rely on the customer actually being able to read the number off the card. And what are the odds that the customer has kept a record of the number on the back of the card?
Then you can look at your printed statement which has the same number on it. Or you can type www.chase.com (or whatever) and find a number. There are lots of ways to get a number you trust -- but the method the banks use, which is to call you out of the blue and expect you to trust the guy on the other end of the phone, is the absolute worst way to do this.
The real safe option is only to call the number printed on the back of your credit/debit card. What's amazing is how badly the banks are set up for this. The following happens to me at least twice a year:
1. I travel for work, and use my credit card for all kinds of things I don't usually buy, like hotel rooms.
2. My wife keeps using the same card for all the stuff we usually buy.
3. The computer says: hey, someone maybe stole the card and is running up all those hotel charges!
4. A human from the security department calls us to verify, gets voicemail, and leaves a callback number that is NOT the callback number on the card.
5. I call back the number on the card. The human there says, "why don't you call the number they gave you?" I explain. They think about it and realize this makes sense. About 15 minutes later, I'm connected to the right people -- usually after going through a supervisor at the call center.
The right way to do it, of course, is to have the human from the security department leave this message: To call us back, call the number on your card; then, immediately enter the following code to be directed to the right department. But they still haven't learned.
I shudder to think what will happen when I'm eventually home when they call. I certainly won't do anything except hang up and call back the same number.
This is simple but eventually they can hack around it:
1. Set up a subdirectory on your Web page, say "foo.com/google/" that directs to google.com.
2. Set up her homepage as foo.com/google. Don't tell anyone else about foo.com/google.
3. When the thieves boot up the PC and get on the Web, they'll automatically go to foo.com/google and, hopefully, won't even notice the redirect. You'll get at least one hit and maybe more.
The down side is that your daughter will trigger these logs too. (That'll happen with pretty much any technique you use, though.) Promise us that you won't go checking on her surfing times.
>Wireless purely for the sake of wireless is just a stupid idea.
There is an incredible convenience to wireless that you're omitting here. Just within my own house, I absolutely adore the ability to use my laptop in the office, kitchen, back yard, etc. This is *worlds* better than having to plug in.
Multiplying this same convenience across a college campus -- to outdoor use, informal study groups in first-floor rooms, empty classrooms, etc. -- would be amazing. I wish I were 18 again.
>If your laptop is running XP Home and you have any shares on your laptop, anything in those shares is fair game to anybody else on the network.
Good point -- I completely forgot about that aspect. (I use a Mac on the road and I have all the ports turned off, so I generally don't worry about incoming threats.)
But you're right -- when I travel with a PC, I always feel like I should carry around a linksys nat/minihub box. There's a business opportunity, a virtually private WiFi. Of course, you'd have to encryt everyone's connection to make it secure, which means you'd have to come up with a whole new protocol...maybe I should carry that linksys box with me.
The article makes no mention of security which, it seems to me, will be the best way to make money in the hot-spot business. When I use a public, non-WEP hotspot, all I ever do is SSL to my command-line account and run pine or some such. (My internet provider hasn't done secure POP yet, but they're working on it.)
On the other hand, maybe there's no money in security either. When traveling for work, I can use secure VPN into the company system, and it doesn't matter whether my hotspot is secure or a total cesspool. So there's no reason to pay extra for T-Mobile on the company dime, and I'm certainly too cheap to pay extra when on my own dime -- I'll just use SSL to check email.
It is a conundrum. Perhaps WPA is the solution, but I'm not waiting up nights for it to be widely implemented.
Why couldn't you have a 100GB account for each employee on the mail server instead? - what is the bloody point to get mail from one network server and move it to another one?
Lots of reasons. First, mail servers just don't work very well when storing large quantities of mail for large quantities of people. I've never seen one that works well. If I'm wrong, please tell me. Second, the file server model is much more flexible: you can spread the accounts out across lots of file servers, but still have one email server for foo.com or whatever. I'd rather be able to store everything on one email server and have everyone have quick access to it, but I've never seen a solution that works.
Actually, storing the messages on local computers in an organization is about the worst thing to do. Most/all user computers are not backed up the way the servers are.
As I said in my message, what I meant by "off-line" was "not on a mail server." I specifically suggested putting "off-line" storage on a file server.
Whether you and I like it or not, there are no mail servers on the market today that are good at storing large quantities of mail for large quantities of people. I wish there were, but there aren't. The best solution is a kludge, but a kludge that works: force people to download their email (making it "off-line" to the mail server) but store it on a file server that is properly backed up.
1. On-line storage. There's no reason to keep all of everyone's mail on-line on the server (a la IMAP or proprietary MS Exchange) instead of offline on their PC's (a la POP, most often seen with Eudora for non-techies). With offline storage, the servers don't clog, and you can keep as much mail as you like.
The biggest rap agains off-line storage is that you can't control what people do with their mail or how they store it. My old job had a neat solution for this: Eudora downloaded your mail, but stored it on a file server. Each employee had 100 GB or something very large. It worked great; the SMTP/POP servers were never full, and everyone could keep their email.
2. Ridiculous stupid bullshit HTML rich-text mail crap. Can you tell I have a bias here? Aside from being annoying, HTML mail can take up to ten times the size of plain old text. Some of the HTML generated by common email programs is just terrible; filled with repeating tags for every line, and just wasting an incredible amount of space for absolutely zero benefit. (Outlook is bad, but there are others that are just as bad.)
There's no excuse for not fixing these problems. Someday someone's going to tell a court they had to delete mail for these reasons, and someone else is going to explain exactly why they're wrong. Until then, people who want to delete mail for legal reasons will hide behind false technical reasons.
Alani Corp. was obviously working on behalf of someone else -- possibly Saddam although, because of long-standing U.S/UN sanctions, likely one of the exile organizations. Now that Iraq is going to have a "government," they quite reasonably want the domain back.
...we'll have the last piece of evidence that they're entirely toothless. Verisign has done a lousy job along every axis, from high fees to poor coordination to the ridiculous "SiteFinder" service. ICANN has tolerated all this, even waiting to get angry about SiteFinder until everyone else did.
ICANN should dump Verisign even if they have the lowest bid. Which they won't. But if they hold onto Verisign, it means they're either scared of Verisign's attorneys (since I'm sure Verisign will sue, since they have no other business) or are totally unable to make important decisions.
This just isn't true. In California, for example, the rule is: "All valid absentee ballots are counted in every election in California, regardless of the outcome or closeness of any race." You can see it yourself here.
I challenge you to find a single state that discards valid absentee ballots without counting them.
It's not actually true that "if outstanding absentee votes are less than the margin of victory, they are discarded." This is a common misconception. In the 2000 election, there was rampant speculation that uncounted absentee ballots in California would give Bush the popular vote. The Secretary of State had to issue a press release saying that all absentee votes had, in fact, been counted.
It would be very difficult to do this: most elections have multiple races, and all races would have to meet your criteria. Most importantly, though, voters would lose confidence if their votes were not actually counted, as noted elsewhere in this thread.
The solution in that case was to take their money before they ever got it.
Actually, the federal withholding tax came about because of World War II. "By early 1943, in the middle of a world war, most Americans realized the treasury needed money quickly and agreed that current collection at the source would provide the needed revenue." For more information, see this interesting article.
As a result of the withholding tax, we lost "the tax year at the end of time." Luckily, we'll never get there.
Maybe it was a lie when Northwest said it would not give out "personal information" to the government, but the lie was almost certainly not perpetrated in connection with teh purchase or sale of a security. If a plaintiff made that allegation, I would love to see what kind of portfolio they hold because that is not the type of material information that one usually uses to buy or sell stocks with.
I'm sorry to report that you misunderstand current securities law:
Under settled Supreme Court precedent, a rebuttable presumption of transaction causation may be established under the "fraud on the market" theory, even where a plaintiff was unaware of the fraudulent conduct at the time of the purchase or sale.
The fraud on the market theory is based on the hypothesis that, in an open and developed securities market, the price of a company's stock is determined by the available material information regarding the company and its business... Misleading statements will therefore defraud purchasers of stock even if the purchasers do not directly rely on the misstatements... The causal connection between the defendants' fraud and the plaintiffs' purchase of stock in such a case is no less significant than in a case of direct reliance on misrepresentations.
Pleading the applicability of the fraud on the market theory, therefore, fulfills a plaintiff's transaction causation pleading requirement.
In re Initial Public Offering Securities Litigation, 21 MC 92 (SAS) [2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 23267 at *4-5] (S.D.N.Y. December 31, 2003) (quoting Basic Inc. v. Levinson, 485 U.S. 224, 241-42, 99 L. Ed. 2d 194, 108 S. Ct. 978 (1988)) (footnotes and internal quotation marks omitted).
Never thought I'd be talking fraud on the market on Slashdot...
In practice, what this means is people who buy during the period of market manipulation can be part of a class action suit, from which they'll receive a few pennies, and the lawyers representing them will receive several million dollars.
Of course, clearly that happens sometimes. The system has a lot of problems, which are complex and outside the scope of this topic. The point I was making was simply that Northwest probably faces liability greater than, say, JetBlue's, because they not only violated privacy but also (apparently beyond doubt) publicly lied about it.
And before you start to think that I'm just being cynical, my part of the recent Schwartz-CitiBank $27 million dollar class action suit was a credit on my bill for $0.09. The lawyers got $9 million.
I think I got 20 cents in that same settlement. Schwartz was not a securities case, of course; big securities class actions can actually result in pretty real money for class members. It's doubtful that any Northwest suits will, but we'll have more of an idea on Tuesday.
Depending on what happens to Northwest's stock price on Tuesday, this one may really hurt. Under the Securities Act of 1934 and rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder:
It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce, or of the mails or of any facility of any national securities exchange,
To employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud, To make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading, or
To engage in any act, practice, or course of business which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon any person,
in connection with the purchase or sale of any security.
In practice, what this means is that if a company (whether or not through a director or officer) lies about something material to the stock price, people who buy during the period of market manipulation (essentially, from the date of the lie until the truth is revealed) can recover for their damages (generally but not always what they paid minus the "true value" of the stock when they bought it).
Setting the "true value" of a stock on a given date, absent the market manipulation, is obviously an excursion into the hypothetical. One strong indicator, however, is how much the stock falls when the truth is revealed. So watch Northwest when the market opens and, if it falls a lot, expect to see securities lawsuits as well as privacy lawsuits.
Oh, of course. Which I why I said "if I wanted to try to distinguish" -- that is, that's an argument I'd make if I were an advocate for this position. But you've correctly noted a flaw in this argument.
Without getting into the ways that people are stretching the definition of "encrypted," you're right, so the DMCA isn't implicated there. My mistake; that's what I get for posting without think.
It is still illegal to produce an infringing device that has no substantial non-infringing use (see Betamax case), so delete "DMCA" from my prior comment and it remains accurate.
That's actually an interesting analogy. Here are some very vague initial thoughts (yes, IAAL):
A commercial broadcast is a copyrighted work. So you can't infringe on that copyright by creating a derivative work. Deleting the commercials creates an unauthorized derivative work, just like deleting certain scenes of a movie creates an unauthorized derivative work. This is why devices that automatically remove the commercials for you infringe.
But wait, you say, I am not deleting the commercials, I am just skipping them! Actually I am not even doing that -- I am just skipping ahead 30 seconds when I feel like it. If that always happens to come during commercials, that's not my fault. This is where it gets really interesting -- the networks say that the 30-second-skip is an infringing device under the DMCA because there is no substantial non-infringing use for a thirty-second skip ahead. That is, the only purpose that most TV users would use for a 30-second skip is to skip commercials, thus creating an unauthorized derivative work. On the other hand, you could say that 30-second skip is no different from fast-forward, and we know fast-forward has a substantial non-infringing use -- going past stuff that you've already seen or don't want to bother with.
If I wanted to distinguish pop-up blockers from replay, I would say that pop-up blockers are different because (1) the commercials are not integrated with the rest of the site (they change by user) and therefore they are not a coherent copyrighted work like a TV broadcast, and (2) pop-up blockers have a substantial non-infringing use because they prevent people from falling into pop-up traps, which are obviously very bad.
This is not quite correct. A party to a civil suit can refuse to answer any question (at trial, in a deposition, or an interrogatory) only if the answer might incriminate them. You can't refuse to answer for no reason. In practice, it isn't a viable option for companies like SCO and IBM to say "we are crooks, therefore we won't answer your interrogatory."
The fifth amendment privilege cannot, however, prevent you from handing over evidence. So if I seek a memo from you, and the memo indicates that you may have committed a crime, you have to cough it up. The amendment protects against forced testimony, not forced production of information already written down.
Slashdot Mirror
They are protesting AT&T's announcement that smartphones are disrupting its network. By using smartphones. To disrupt AT&T's network?
Kaminsky has an interesting rebuttal here.
The performer of a song has a copyright protecting that performance, although obvs. not in the underlying song. Unlike a songwriter (who cannot block covers because of the compulsory license) a performer can block reproduction of the performance. So it seems as if Prince is acting within his rights to assert a copyright over the performance, at least under U.S. law. Whether that copyright trumps fair use, etc., I don't know. But it's not correct to say that Prince has no copyright because he didn't write the song. Like most Slashdotters, I hate the DMCA, and I think it's madness for Prince to try to block this stuff, since it's good advertising and he'll sell more albums if he doesn't, but there it is.
But since they're checking the card isn't stolen, they can't rely on the customer actually being able to read the number off the card. And what are the odds that the customer has kept a record of the number on the back of the card?
Then you can look at your printed statement which has the same number on it. Or you can type www.chase.com (or whatever) and find a number. There are lots of ways to get a number you trust -- but the method the banks use, which is to call you out of the blue and expect you to trust the guy on the other end of the phone, is the absolute worst way to do this.
The real safe option is only to call the number printed on the back of your credit/debit card. What's amazing is how badly the banks are set up for this. The following happens to me at least twice a year:
1. I travel for work, and use my credit card for all kinds of things I don't usually buy, like hotel rooms.
2. My wife keeps using the same card for all the stuff we usually buy.
3. The computer says: hey, someone maybe stole the card and is running up all those hotel charges!
4. A human from the security department calls us to verify, gets voicemail, and leaves a callback number that is NOT the callback number on the card.
5. I call back the number on the card. The human there says, "why don't you call the number they gave you?" I explain. They think about it and realize this makes sense. About 15 minutes later, I'm connected to the right people -- usually after going through a supervisor at the call center.
The right way to do it, of course, is to have the human from the security department leave this message: To call us back, call the number on your card; then, immediately enter the following code to be directed to the right department. But they still haven't learned.
I shudder to think what will happen when I'm eventually home when they call. I certainly won't do anything except hang up and call back the same number.
This is simple but eventually they can hack around it:
1. Set up a subdirectory on your Web page, say "foo.com/google/" that directs to google.com.
2. Set up her homepage as foo.com/google. Don't tell anyone else about foo.com/google.
3. When the thieves boot up the PC and get on the Web, they'll automatically go to foo.com/google and, hopefully, won't even notice the redirect. You'll get at least one hit and maybe more.
The down side is that your daughter will trigger these logs too. (That'll happen with pretty much any technique you use, though.) Promise us that you won't go checking on her surfing times.
>Wireless purely for the sake of wireless is just a stupid idea.
There is an incredible convenience to wireless that you're omitting here. Just within my own house, I absolutely adore the ability to use my laptop in the office, kitchen, back yard, etc. This is *worlds* better than having to plug in.
Multiplying this same convenience across a college campus -- to outdoor use, informal study groups in first-floor rooms, empty classrooms, etc. -- would be amazing. I wish I were 18 again.
>If your laptop is running XP Home and you have any shares on your laptop, anything in those shares is fair game to anybody else on the network.
Good point -- I completely forgot about that aspect. (I use a Mac on the road and I have all the ports turned off, so I generally don't worry about incoming threats.)
But you're right -- when I travel with a PC, I always feel like I should carry around a linksys nat/minihub box. There's a business opportunity, a virtually private WiFi. Of course, you'd have to encryt everyone's connection to make it secure, which means you'd have to come up with a whole new protocol...maybe I should carry that linksys box with me.
The article makes no mention of security which, it seems to me, will be the best way to make money in the hot-spot business. When I use a public, non-WEP hotspot, all I ever do is SSL to my command-line account and run pine or some such. (My internet provider hasn't done secure POP yet, but they're working on it.)
On the other hand, maybe there's no money in security either. When traveling for work, I can use secure VPN into the company system, and it doesn't matter whether my hotspot is secure or a total cesspool. So there's no reason to pay extra for T-Mobile on the company dime, and I'm certainly too cheap to pay extra when on my own dime -- I'll just use SSL to check email.
It is a conundrum. Perhaps WPA is the solution, but I'm not waiting up nights for it to be widely implemented.
Why couldn't you have a 100GB account for each employee on the mail server instead? - what is the bloody point to get mail from one network server and move it to another one?
Lots of reasons. First, mail servers just don't work very well when storing large quantities of mail for large quantities of people. I've never seen one that works well. If I'm wrong, please tell me. Second, the file server model is much more flexible: you can spread the accounts out across lots of file servers, but still have one email server for foo.com or whatever. I'd rather be able to store everything on one email server and have everyone have quick access to it, but I've never seen a solution that works.
Actually, storing the messages on local computers in an organization is about the worst thing to do. Most/all user computers are not backed up the way the servers are.
As I said in my message, what I meant by "off-line" was "not on a mail server." I specifically suggested putting "off-line" storage on a file server.
Whether you and I like it or not, there are no mail servers on the market today that are good at storing large quantities of mail for large quantities of people. I wish there were, but there aren't. The best solution is a kludge, but a kludge that works: force people to download their email (making it "off-line" to the mail server) but store it on a file server that is properly backed up.
There are two technical culprits here:
1. On-line storage. There's no reason to keep all of everyone's mail on-line on the server (a la IMAP or proprietary MS Exchange) instead of offline on their PC's (a la POP, most often seen with Eudora for non-techies). With offline storage, the servers don't clog, and you can keep as much mail as you like.
The biggest rap agains off-line storage is that you can't control what people do with their mail or how they store it. My old job had a neat solution for this: Eudora downloaded your mail, but stored it on a file server. Each employee had 100 GB or something very large. It worked great; the SMTP/POP servers were never full, and everyone could keep their email.
2. Ridiculous stupid bullshit HTML rich-text mail crap. Can you tell I have a bias here? Aside from being annoying, HTML mail can take up to ten times the size of plain old text. Some of the HTML generated by common email programs is just terrible; filled with repeating tags for every line, and just wasting an incredible amount of space for absolutely zero benefit. (Outlook is bad, but there are others that are just as bad.)
There's no excuse for not fixing these problems. Someday someone's going to tell a court they had to delete mail for these reasons, and someone else is going to explain exactly why they're wrong. Until then, people who want to delete mail for legal reasons will hide behind false technical reasons.
Alani Corp. was obviously working on behalf of someone else -- possibly Saddam although, because of long-standing U.S/UN sanctions, likely one of the exile organizations. Now that Iraq is going to have a "government," they quite reasonably want the domain back.
...we'll have the last piece of evidence that they're entirely toothless. Verisign has done a lousy job along every axis, from high fees to poor coordination to the ridiculous "SiteFinder" service. ICANN has tolerated all this, even waiting to get angry about SiteFinder until everyone else did.
ICANN should dump Verisign even if they have the lowest bid. Which they won't. But if they hold onto Verisign, it means they're either scared of Verisign's attorneys (since I'm sure Verisign will sue, since they have no other business) or are totally unable to make important decisions.
I challenge you to find a single state that discards valid absentee ballots without counting them.
It's not actually true that "if outstanding absentee votes are less than the margin of victory, they are discarded." This is a common misconception. In the 2000 election, there was rampant speculation that uncounted absentee ballots in California would give Bush the popular vote. The Secretary of State had to issue a press release saying that all absentee votes had, in fact, been counted.
It would be very difficult to do this: most elections have multiple races, and all races would have to meet your criteria. Most importantly, though, voters would lose confidence if their votes were not actually counted, as noted elsewhere in this thread.
Z = 1280 in my experience.
Actually, the federal withholding tax came about because of World War II. "By early 1943, in the middle of a world war, most Americans realized the treasury needed money quickly and agreed that current collection at the source would provide the needed revenue." For more information, see this interesting article.
As a result of the withholding tax, we lost "the tax year at the end of time." Luckily, we'll never get there.
Maybe it was a lie when Northwest said it would not give out "personal information" to the government, but the lie was almost certainly not perpetrated in connection with teh purchase or sale of a security. If a plaintiff made that allegation, I would love to see what kind of portfolio they hold because that is not the type of material information that one usually uses to buy or sell stocks with.
I'm sorry to report that you misunderstand current securities law:
In re Initial Public Offering Securities Litigation, 21 MC 92 (SAS) [2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 23267 at *4-5] (S.D.N.Y. December 31, 2003) (quoting Basic Inc. v. Levinson, 485 U.S. 224, 241-42, 99 L. Ed. 2d 194, 108 S. Ct. 978 (1988)) (footnotes and internal quotation marks omitted).
Never thought I'd be talking fraud on the market on Slashdot...
Of course, clearly that happens sometimes. The system has a lot of problems, which are complex and outside the scope of this topic. The point I was making was simply that Northwest probably faces liability greater than, say, JetBlue's, because they not only violated privacy but also (apparently beyond doubt) publicly lied about it.
I think I got 20 cents in that same settlement. Schwartz was not a securities case, of course; big securities class actions can actually result in pretty real money for class members. It's doubtful that any Northwest suits will, but we'll have more of an idea on Tuesday.
Depending on what happens to Northwest's stock price on Tuesday, this one may really hurt. Under the Securities Act of 1934 and rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder:
In practice, what this means is that if a company (whether or not through a director or officer) lies about something material to the stock price, people who buy during the period of market manipulation (essentially, from the date of the lie until the truth is revealed) can recover for their damages (generally but not always what they paid minus the "true value" of the stock when they bought it).Setting the "true value" of a stock on a given date, absent the market manipulation, is obviously an excursion into the hypothetical. One strong indicator, however, is how much the stock falls when the truth is revealed. So watch Northwest when the market opens and, if it falls a lot, expect to see securities lawsuits as well as privacy lawsuits.
Oh, of course. Which I why I said "if I wanted to try to distinguish" -- that is, that's an argument I'd make if I were an advocate for this position. But you've correctly noted a flaw in this argument.
Without getting into the ways that people are stretching the definition of "encrypted," you're right, so the DMCA isn't implicated there. My mistake; that's what I get for posting without think. It is still illegal to produce an infringing device that has no substantial non-infringing use (see Betamax case), so delete "DMCA" from my prior comment and it remains accurate.
That's actually an interesting analogy. Here are some very vague initial thoughts (yes, IAAL):
A commercial broadcast is a copyrighted work. So you can't infringe on that copyright by creating a derivative work. Deleting the commercials creates an unauthorized derivative work, just like deleting certain scenes of a movie creates an unauthorized derivative work. This is why devices that automatically remove the commercials for you infringe.
But wait, you say, I am not deleting the commercials, I am just skipping them! Actually I am not even doing that -- I am just skipping ahead 30 seconds when I feel like it. If that always happens to come during commercials, that's not my fault. This is where it gets really interesting -- the networks say that the 30-second-skip is an infringing device under the DMCA because there is no substantial non-infringing use for a thirty-second skip ahead. That is, the only purpose that most TV users would use for a 30-second skip is to skip commercials, thus creating an unauthorized derivative work. On the other hand, you could say that 30-second skip is no different from fast-forward, and we know fast-forward has a substantial non-infringing use -- going past stuff that you've already seen or don't want to bother with.
If I wanted to distinguish pop-up blockers from replay, I would say that pop-up blockers are different because (1) the commercials are not integrated with the rest of the site (they change by user) and therefore they are not a coherent copyrighted work like a TV broadcast, and (2) pop-up blockers have a substantial non-infringing use because they prevent people from falling into pop-up traps, which are obviously very bad.
But I'm not sure that argument would win.
This is not quite correct. A party to a civil suit can refuse to answer any question (at trial, in a deposition, or an interrogatory) only if the answer might incriminate them. You can't refuse to answer for no reason. In practice, it isn't a viable option for companies like SCO and IBM to say "we are crooks, therefore we won't answer your interrogatory."
The fifth amendment privilege cannot, however, prevent you from handing over evidence. So if I seek a memo from you, and the memo indicates that you may have committed a crime, you have to cough it up. The amendment protects against forced testimony, not forced production of information already written down.
Yes, IAAL, but not a criminal lawyer.