Trial court decisions and settlements are never binding on anyone else anyhow. The principle is that decisions of a higher court are binding on the lower courts within its jurisdiction. If, for example, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit issues an opinion, that opinion is binding on the federal trial courts within the 2nd Circuit, but not elsewhere. Since a trial court has no lower courts within its jurisdiction, its decisions are binding only on the parties to the particular case. They extend elsewhere only in the limited circumstances resulting from estoppel.
Sort of. On the one hand, the courts operate on the perhaps dubious principle that "ignorance of the law is no excuse". However, in quite a few cases, laws have been declared unconstitutional on the grounds of excessive vagueness. In other words, if the legal establishment is clear as to what a law means, ordinary people are assumed to know what it means too, but if even the lawyers and judges find it too unclear, violators can't be held responsible.
This does mean, though, that the defendant has to be able to convince the court that the law is unconstitutionally vague, not merely that that particular defendant didn't understand it.
This is possible in the US under limited circumstances. It's called a "suit for declaratory judgment". One of the few situations in which it is possible is when someone wants a court to declare that a product does not violate a patent.
In general, however, this is not possible. The US court system was explicitly set up to prevent it. Article III, section 2, clause 1 of the Constitution empowers the courts only to hear cases involving "actual controversy". This has been interpreted as preventing the courts from issuing opinions by reference from the government (in some countries the government can ask the Supreme Court to decide on the constitutionality of a proposed law before enacting it) and as preventing most similar private requests for an opinion. Whether this provision is a good idea or not is another question.
Supreme Court of India cases are on-line, at http://judis.nic.in/supremecourt/chejudis.asp.
However, I can't find this case. Maybe I've missed it, or maybe the decision is too recent and hasn't yet been posted.
The press report on this case is too vague to allow us to determine what the Supreme Court decided. Indian Supreme Court decisions are not published on the net, are they?
There seem to be at least three issues here. First, is the student's blog community a public forum? If it is, the potentially offending material is "published" and subject to legal action. If it is not, it is essentially a private discussion and not subject to legal action. The press report suggests that this is one of the issues and that the court decided, probably correctly, that the student's blog community is not private.
Second, is the author of the blog responsible for the posts of commenters or only for his own posts? The article suggests that this is an issue in that it is what the disclaimer refers to, but it isn't clear what Indian law says about this issue and what exactly the Supreme Court said about it.
Third, what sort of content is actionable? This is not a libel case, and based on what little the article says about the offending content, would not be actionable as a libel case in the US or even, I think, in England. India apparently has a law that criminalizes the publication of statements that are divisive. It is this law under which the student has been charged. It sounds like a law that would be unconstitutional in the US.
The only sense I can make of this is that Jones Day doesn't want the firm to be permanently associated with those two names. Hard to guess why. Do they have really bad reputations? Are they going to be fired soon?
What is done to the kids, where the pictures are of actual events, is indeed terrible and should be prosecuted vigorously. There is, however, no reason to think that possessing or looking at such pictures is harmful.
If you want the technical legal terminology, the question is whether Yelp is a "conduit",
"distributor", or "primary publisher". Primary publishers are strictly liable, conduits are not liable at all, and distributors are liable under certain circumstances. The risk to Yelp is that by removing negative reviews they control content and become a primary publisher. It seems very likely, though, that few Slashdot readers know these terms but that most understand what a "common carrier" is in telecommunications and in the extended sense.
Your analogy to not posting whatever comes to mind is incorrect. The issue is whether Yelp is acting merely as a forum for others, in which case it is not liable for what they post, or whether it is selecting material to post, in which case it is a publisher and is liable.
As for "common carrier", the term is commonly extended from its original use with respect to telephone companies and the like to ISPs and other hosts that do not control content.
If Yelp removes negative reviews for a fee, it seems to me that they have given up their common carrier status and have made themselves liable for errors in the reviews they leave up. Restaurants that receive negative reviews could sue Yelp for libel if they can demonstrate errors in the reviews.
This isn't really accurate. Although it is true that copyright law appears to prohibit the mere creation of a derivative work whether or not it is distributed, in fact some kinds of derivative work are not considered infringing so long as they are not published. If your interpretation were correct, annotating your own copy of a copyrighted book would constitute copyright infringement, which is not the case. You are perfectly free to annotate your books - you are not free to publish your own annotated edition of someone else's book. Similarly, it is infringing to publish a translation of a copyrighted work, but you may make your own translation and keep it for your own use.
Are those Masters degrees in real subjects or do they accept education degrees and the so-called "Master in Teaching", which tends to be very much watered down?
While the RIAA's policy arguments are easily dismissed, it isn't so clear to me that they are wrong about the Massachusetts rules prohibiting broadcasting. Would someone knowledgable (e.g. Ray Beckerman) care to comment on that aspect of the argument?
I think that carrying journalists is routine. Here's one source that mentions this. Apparently the number of journalists that assigned to the President is too large to fit on Air Force One so a chartered plane usually follows Air Force One around.
While the President clearly does need something bigger than a two-seater, as I understand it Air Force 1 usually carries a substantial number of journalists in addition to the crew and staff. I suspect that the main purpose of this is to allow the White House to ingratiate itself with journalists and punish those it doesn't like by excluding them, which is not something we need to pay for. On the other hand, I don't know that not bringing along the journalists would allow the plane to be smaller and cheaper.
For those of us willing to have our former bodies used for any good purpose, the existing system is frustrating because there is no coordination among multiple uses. Your body can be put to three different uses after death: (a) organ donation; (b) medical research; (c) medical training. Organ donation and medical research are in principle compatible - whatever organs aren't need for transplantation are available for research. However, neither of these uses is compatible with medical training: medical schools want the whole body for use in anatomy classes, not whatever is left after bits have been removed for transplantation or research. Furthermore, at least here in British Columbia, and as far as I know, everywhere else, there are three separate systems for the three uses. What I would prefer is to be able to sign up in one place to donate my body for whatever is the best use at the time. If an organ is critically needed, give it to someone, and use the remainder for research. If no organs are needed for transplantation, use it for research or anatomy class, wherever the need is greater.
I guess nobody told her about how proprietary Excel is inferior to libre Gnumeric in having quite a few errors in its statistical functions and how when apprised of errors the Gnumeric folks fixed them quickly while the Excel folks either never fixed them, did it slowly, or introduced new errors? See the report by Drexel University statistician B. D. McCullough.
Ms. Pariser is a lawyer and therefore an officer of the court even when she acts as a witness rather than as counsel for a party. Knowing misrepresentation of the law by an officer of the court is unethical and a potential cause for disciplinary action.
I don't see the point in using activity as a measure of a program's success. The real questions are whether it has the desired functionality, whether it is sufficiently easy to use for its purpose, whether bugs are resolved with appropriate speed and whether it runs on the desired set of platforms. A mature program may need very little modification. This isn't to say that OO is perfect, but whatever its failings are, this doesn't measure them.
Similarly, the number of people involved is not in and of itself a useful measure. There are plenty of quite successful projects in which virtually all of the work (up to the occasional
patch submitted with a bug report and that sort of thing) is done by a single person.
Government employees aren't supposed to be using government computers for non-government purposes. I can't complain if Cheney has a few shopping lists and personal emails lying around, but truly personal files should be few and small. If he claims that any substantial portion of his files are personal, he's either lying or he has been misusing government property.
Slashdot Mirror
Trial court decisions and settlements are never binding on anyone else anyhow. The principle is that decisions of a higher court are binding on the lower courts within its jurisdiction. If, for example, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit issues an opinion, that opinion is binding on the federal trial courts within the 2nd Circuit, but not elsewhere. Since a trial court has no lower courts within its jurisdiction, its decisions are binding only on the parties to the particular case. They extend elsewhere only in the limited circumstances resulting from estoppel.
No! No! No! Shiv Sena is not Buddhist. It is Hindu. The name means "Army of Shiva", one of the three main Hindu gods.
Sort of. On the one hand, the courts operate on the perhaps dubious principle that "ignorance of the law is no excuse". However, in quite a few cases, laws have been declared unconstitutional on the grounds of excessive vagueness. In other words, if the legal establishment is clear as to what a law means, ordinary people are assumed to know what it means too, but if even the lawyers and judges find it too unclear, violators can't be held responsible.
This does mean, though, that the defendant has to be able to convince the court that the law is unconstitutionally vague, not merely that that particular defendant didn't understand it.
This is possible in the US under limited circumstances. It's called a "suit for declaratory judgment". One of the few situations in which it is possible is when someone wants a court to declare that a product does not violate a patent.
In general, however, this is not possible. The US court system was explicitly set up to prevent it. Article III, section 2, clause 1 of the Constitution empowers the courts only to hear cases involving "actual controversy". This has been interpreted as preventing the courts from issuing opinions by reference from the government (in some countries the government can ask the Supreme Court to decide on the constitutionality of a proposed law before enacting it) and as preventing most similar private requests for an opinion. Whether this provision is a good idea or not is another question.
This isn't a defamation case in the usual sense. The guy is charged under an Indian law that criminalizes divisive speech.
Supreme Court of India cases are on-line, at http://judis.nic.in/supremecourt/chejudis.asp. However, I can't find this case. Maybe I've missed it, or maybe the decision is too recent and hasn't yet been posted.
The press report on this case is too vague to allow us to determine what the Supreme Court decided. Indian Supreme Court decisions are not published on the net, are they?
There seem to be at least three issues here. First, is the student's blog community a public forum? If it is, the potentially offending material is "published" and subject to legal action. If it is not, it is essentially a private discussion and not subject to legal action. The press report suggests that this is one of the issues and that the court decided, probably correctly, that the student's blog community is not private.
Second, is the author of the blog responsible for the posts of commenters or only for his own posts? The article suggests that this is an issue in that it is what the disclaimer refers to, but it isn't clear what Indian law says about this issue and what exactly the Supreme Court said about it.
Third, what sort of content is actionable? This is not a libel case, and based on what little the article says about the offending content, would not be actionable as a libel case in the US or even, I think, in England. India apparently has a law that criminalizes the publication of statements that are divisive. It is this law under which the student has been charged. It sounds like a law that would be unconstitutional in the US.
The affected employees should repay Microsoft in the form of coupons that Microsoft can exchange for their services in the future.
The only sense I can make of this is that Jones Day doesn't want the firm to be permanently associated with those two names. Hard to guess why. Do they have really bad reputations? Are they going to be fired soon?
What is done to the kids, where the pictures are of actual events, is indeed terrible and should be prosecuted vigorously. There is, however, no reason to think that possessing or looking at such pictures is harmful.
If you want the technical legal terminology, the question is whether Yelp is a "conduit", "distributor", or "primary publisher". Primary publishers are strictly liable, conduits are not liable at all, and distributors are liable under certain circumstances. The risk to Yelp is that by removing negative reviews they control content and become a primary publisher. It seems very likely, though, that few Slashdot readers know these terms but that most understand what a "common carrier" is in telecommunications and in the extended sense.
Maybe so, but the extension is in common use. I didn't invent it.
Your analogy to not posting whatever comes to mind is incorrect. The issue is whether Yelp is acting merely as a forum for others, in which case it is not liable for what they post, or whether it is selecting material to post, in which case it is a publisher and is liable.
As for "common carrier", the term is commonly extended from its original use with respect to telephone companies and the like to ISPs and other hosts that do not control content.
If Yelp removes negative reviews for a fee, it seems to me that they have given up their common carrier status and have made themselves liable for errors in the reviews they leave up. Restaurants that receive negative reviews could sue Yelp for libel if they can demonstrate errors in the reviews.
This isn't really accurate. Although it is true that copyright law appears to prohibit the mere creation of a derivative work whether or not it is distributed, in fact some kinds of derivative work are not considered infringing so long as they are not published. If your interpretation were correct, annotating your own copy of a copyrighted book would constitute copyright infringement, which is not the case. You are perfectly free to annotate your books - you are not free to publish your own annotated edition of someone else's book. Similarly, it is infringing to publish a translation of a copyrighted work, but you may make your own translation and keep it for your own use.
Are those Masters degrees in real subjects or do they accept education degrees and the so-called "Master in Teaching", which tends to be very much watered down?
While the RIAA's policy arguments are easily dismissed, it isn't so clear to me that they are wrong about the Massachusetts rules prohibiting broadcasting. Would someone knowledgable (e.g. Ray Beckerman) care to comment on that aspect of the argument?
I think that carrying journalists is routine. Here's one source that mentions this. Apparently the number of journalists that assigned to the President is too large to fit on Air Force One so a chartered plane usually follows Air Force One around.
While the President clearly does need something bigger than a two-seater, as I understand it Air Force 1 usually carries a substantial number of journalists in addition to the crew and staff. I suspect that the main purpose of this is to allow the White House to ingratiate itself with journalists and punish those it doesn't like by excluding them, which is not something we need to pay for. On the other hand, I don't know that not bringing along the journalists would allow the plane to be smaller and cheaper.
For those of us willing to have our former bodies used for any good purpose, the existing system is frustrating because there is no coordination among multiple uses. Your body can be put to three different uses after death: (a) organ donation; (b) medical research; (c) medical training. Organ donation and medical research are in principle compatible - whatever organs aren't need for transplantation are available for research. However, neither of these uses is compatible with medical training: medical schools want the whole body for use in anatomy classes, not whatever is left after bits have been removed for transplantation or research. Furthermore, at least here in British Columbia, and as far as I know, everywhere else, there are three separate systems for the three uses. What I would prefer is to be able to sign up in one place to donate my body for whatever is the best use at the time. If an organ is critically needed, give it to someone, and use the remainder for research. If no organs are needed for transplantation, use it for research or anatomy class, wherever the need is greater.
I guess nobody told her about how proprietary Excel is inferior to libre Gnumeric in having quite a few errors in its statistical functions and how when apprised of errors the Gnumeric folks fixed them quickly while the Excel folks either never fixed them, did it slowly, or introduced new errors? See the report by Drexel University statistician B. D. McCullough.
Mod this down. It's not a legitimate link, or even humorous, it's a browser trap.
Ms. Pariser is a lawyer and therefore an officer of the court even when she acts as a witness rather than as counsel for a party. Knowing misrepresentation of the law by an officer of the court is unethical and a potential cause for disciplinary action.
I don't see the point in using activity as a measure of a program's success. The real questions are whether it has the desired functionality, whether it is sufficiently easy to use for its purpose, whether bugs are resolved with appropriate speed and whether it runs on the desired set of platforms. A mature program may need very little modification. This isn't to say that OO is perfect, but whatever its failings are, this doesn't measure them.
Similarly, the number of people involved is not in and of itself a useful measure. There are plenty of quite successful projects in which virtually all of the work (up to the occasional patch submitted with a bug report and that sort of thing) is done by a single person.
Government employees aren't supposed to be using government computers for non-government purposes. I can't complain if Cheney has a few shopping lists and personal emails lying around, but truly personal files should be few and small. If he claims that any substantial portion of his files are personal, he's either lying or he has been misusing government property.