Except in this case, Paypal's actions indicate they are open to harming your business interests, too. An actor expressing his (odious) political views does not make his movies crappy except to the extent that the audience cannot forget the actor and be sucked into the performance.
Tim Robbins in War of the Worlds was like this for me: he had expressed his political stance regarding the Iraqi conflict (which is not necessarily odious to me) so often and vocally before WotW came out, that when his character showed up and talked about "going underground" and military occupations and such, I couldn't help but be thrown out of the story and back into the real world of actors making political statements.
(I should also point out that S.D.N.Y. (NYC), the the federal district courts in California--in particular C.D. Cal. (Hollywood) and N.D. Cal. (Silicon Valley)--and their superior courts the 2d and 9th Circuits are the courts for this type of copyright litigation. There's almost nothing anywhere else, except maybe one or two out of the 7th Cir. (Chicago).
Of all of these, the 7th Cir. is probably the most friendly to Slashdot-type beliefs. This is the circuit that recently held that, in effect, a cloud computing Tivoesque service offered by a cable company did not infringe copyrights despite making unauthorized copies and streaming them to users (said to be "public performance" but the 7th Cir. didn't think so, IIRC)
Technically, at least in the US, most jurisdictions find downloading to not be illegal. It is the uploading which is illegal.
[[citation needed]]
This is the kind of thing high school freshmen tell each other on the school bus. I've never seen a court in the US definitively hold this, let alone an appellate court.
To quote S.D.N.Y.,
the use of P2P systems to download and distribute copyrighted music has been held to constitute copyright infringement. See A & M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004, 1013-14 (9th Cir.2001) (holding that downloading and distribution of copyrighted music via P2P network Napster constituted copyright infringement); In re Aimster Copyright Litigation, 334 F.3d 643, 653 (7th Cir.2003) (affirming grant of preliminary injunction against P2P network Aimster in absence of evidence that system was used to transfer non-copyrighted files), cert. denied, Deep v. Recording Indus. Ass'n of America, Inc., ___ U.S. ___, 124 S.Ct. 1069, 157 L.Ed.2d 893 (2004).
That "elementary school" notion is, in fact, just the express division of responsibilities set out in Articles I-III of the U.S. Constitution.
There is no express separation of powers in the Constitution, nor was there in practice at any point during the Founders' Era.
The fact is, when Congress strikes down a law, it is called "legislation." When a court does exactly the same thing, you're calling it "interpretation."
You can change the labels all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that they're doing the same thing as Congress.
Furthermore, there are plenty of times when the courts do, indeed, legislate from the bench. Check up on "gap filling," "common law," and other things like that.
The "separation of powers" is not so simple as you are taught in elementary school. It is far more complex, with numerous instances of the three branches overlapping in authority from the get-go of the nation.
Except that is not at all close to what happened here. If you follow the frigging hypertext reference trail (FTFHTRT, pronounced "fit fa hit rit"), you will read that the girl
admitted to using KaZaA as well as downloading and sharing music over the P2P network, but said she didn't realize what she was doing was wrong.
So she admitted to knowingly sharing files over the Internet; she just thought it was legal to do so.
So, as I characterized earlier, her "innocent infringement" defense was nothing more than "I didn't know what I was knowingly doing was against the law."
Couple things: 1. They likely wrote "innocence" as a quote of what she claimed. For example, Cowboyneal claimed "Slashdot" is the best website in existence. This serves to place emphasis on which site was claimed to be the best. It's a writing technique, and the clerks working for the SCOTUS justices are uniformly highly educated in such techniques.
2. Innocence is not a defense to that of strict liability. Furthermore, innocence is not always a defense in civil proceedings (of which copyright infringement is a creature). Well, I suppose it depends on what we mean by "innocence." If we mean "it is factually untrue that my files were made available through my action or inaction" then it would be a defense. But I am under the impression the claim of "innocence" was "I lacked the intent but still committed the act," which is not a defense to copyright infringement IIRC.
No, they are striking it down. In many instances, they interpret it, conclude it cannot stand, and then strike it down. You're merely playing semantics by suggesting "striking down law" does not mean "making a law unenforceable." Why you're doing this, I've no idea, but I'd be willing to guess it's because you want to defend the elementary school notion that the legislature makes, executive applies, and judiciary interprets the law.
Here you can see the Supreme Court itself use the language "strike down" in reference to what it has historically done to many laws.
I'm just going to skip to the bottom of the comments and assume there were 27 car analogies, 183 mistaken uses of "patent" or "trademark" instead of "copyright," accusations of "copyright troll," and a not uncommon call for copyright to be abolished.
when more than half of your federal budget goes towards social services, you no longer get to call yourself a capitalist country
That's a silly definition of capitalism. Every dollar any government spends is a social service. Defense? Social service. Police? Social service. Etc.
The metric concerning money should not be percentage of the federal budget that is social services expenditures; the metric should be percent of income that is kept by private actors. As capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production and the means of production being operated for private profit. Seeing as how there is no type of income in the United States that is taxed greater than 50%, you'd be hard pressed to refer to the economy as socialist.
Instead, at best, you could call the US a capitalist-socialist hybrid, with it lying on the strong-capitalist side of the continuum (to borrow nomenclature from atheism classification). And, as it turns out, pretty much every country in the world is a capitalist-socialist hybrid lying on the strong-capitalist side. Perhaps there are a couple purely socialist countries or C-S hybrids lying on the strong-socialist side (too lazy to actually do research into exactly what %age of ownership in N. Korea, etc., is private).
But to call the US not capitalist based on the percentage government expenditures that are social services is just plain silly.
Yeah, but the truth is, you did read his whole comment and chose not to address it. You know it, he knows it, I know it, and all of Slashdot knows it. No one actually stops reading a comment because the first sentence pisses him off, and no amount of verbal tapdancing can hide that universal truth from all us Joe Binaries who have spent decades sitting at a terminal.
So your proposed solution is either (0) no such thing as anthropogenic climate change; (1) let us all die out because we can't help it without regulations, which are worse than mass extinction; or (2) kill every last human except we elite Slashdotters?
Because a climate change "alarmist" cannot persuade people by advocating we slaughter 5bn people from 6bn (or are we at 7bn now?), the only available alternative is to reduce each human's footprint by a factor of 1/6.
I can't speak for the MIT license, but the GPL is most definitely NOT a EULA.
Your definition of "EULA" is not a correct definition. Tell me which of the letters in "EULA" are inapplicable to the GPL.
It doesn't govern the usage of the software, it governs only the redistribution of the software.
In what world is "redistribution" not a type of "usage"?
Also, the GPL says "[t]his License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program." Sounds to me like the GPL governs more than just redistribution!
100,000 people download a song. Each person is criminally liable for their own download. Fines should thus reflect people trying to be cheap and get a $1 product for free. Something on the order of $2-$20 per song would probably be the right amount.
The very reason we don't have this type of system is because the likelihood of being able to catch even 1% of downloaders is slim. I wish I had the case name at my fingertips now, but going on scholar.google.com, you should be able to find cases saying as much when discussing why we have a statutory rate set for infringement penalties instead of the system you describe.
Basically in your system you'd just have everyone pay $5/month to tunnel their traffic through a foreign VPN and swap music with impunity. It's not cost effective to issue the equivalent of a subpoena in a foreign nation to turn over a user's identity for downloading one or two songs and recover $2. But it is sure cost efficient to do what happened here, even if you would have spent $20,000 to get the person's real identity (and even when it sometimes turned out not to be someone subject to your jurisdiction in the first place).
Well the Copyright Act does answer many of these questions already (but not all of them, yes--I actually wrote something of a dissertation on an unsettled issue of copyright law a year or so ago in my last year of law school). The rights you can infringe include public performance, distribution to the public, etc.
In case you're curious, the questions I addressed were, among others, what constitutes commerciality in network streaming situations, what is a distribution, what is a "public" performance, certain novel situations that may or may not be considered "fair use," etc.
At some point I'll get around to publishing the thing or making it available to Slashdot. But when I started working I abandoned final editing.
Slashdot Mirror
Except in this case, Paypal's actions indicate they are open to harming your business interests, too. An actor expressing his (odious) political views does not make his movies crappy except to the extent that the audience cannot forget the actor and be sucked into the performance.
Tim Robbins in War of the Worlds was like this for me: he had expressed his political stance regarding the Iraqi conflict (which is not necessarily odious to me) so often and vocally before WotW came out, that when his character showed up and talked about "going underground" and military occupations and such, I couldn't help but be thrown out of the story and back into the real world of actors making political statements.
Just like having your house fire put out by complete strangers is a HUMAN RIGHT, right?
The government is enabled to do many things that aren't RIGHTs, and they are right to do many of the things they can that aren't RIGHTs-enabling.
(I should also point out that S.D.N.Y. (NYC), the the federal district courts in California--in particular C.D. Cal. (Hollywood) and N.D. Cal. (Silicon Valley)--and their superior courts the 2d and 9th Circuits are the courts for this type of copyright litigation. There's almost nothing anywhere else, except maybe one or two out of the 7th Cir. (Chicago).
Of all of these, the 7th Cir. is probably the most friendly to Slashdot-type beliefs. This is the circuit that recently held that, in effect, a cloud computing Tivoesque service offered by a cable company did not infringe copyrights despite making unauthorized copies and streaming them to users (said to be "public performance" but the 7th Cir. didn't think so, IIRC)
[[citation needed]]
This is the kind of thing high school freshmen tell each other on the school bus. I've never seen a court in the US definitively hold this, let alone an appellate court.
To quote S.D.N.Y.,
The precedential value of trial court decisions is de minimis.
There is no express separation of powers in the Constitution, nor was there in practice at any point during the Founders' Era.
The fact is, when Congress strikes down a law, it is called "legislation." When a court does exactly the same thing, you're calling it "interpretation."
You can change the labels all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that they're doing the same thing as Congress.
Furthermore, there are plenty of times when the courts do, indeed, legislate from the bench. Check up on "gap filling," "common law," and other things like that.
The "separation of powers" is not so simple as you are taught in elementary school. It is far more complex, with numerous instances of the three branches overlapping in authority from the get-go of the nation.
Except that is not at all close to what happened here. If you follow the frigging hypertext reference trail (FTFHTRT, pronounced "fit fa hit rit"), you will read that the girl
So she admitted to knowingly sharing files over the Internet; she just thought it was legal to do so.
So, as I characterized earlier, her "innocent infringement" defense was nothing more than "I didn't know what I was knowingly doing was against the law."
Couple things:
1. They likely wrote "innocence" as a quote of what she claimed. For example, Cowboyneal claimed "Slashdot" is the best website in existence. This serves to place emphasis on which site was claimed to be the best. It's a writing technique, and the clerks working for the SCOTUS justices are uniformly highly educated in such techniques.
2. Innocence is not a defense to that of strict liability. Furthermore, innocence is not always a defense in civil proceedings (of which copyright infringement is a creature). Well, I suppose it depends on what we mean by "innocence." If we mean "it is factually untrue that my files were made available through my action or inaction" then it would be a defense. But I am under the impression the claim of "innocence" was "I lacked the intent but still committed the act," which is not a defense to copyright infringement IIRC.
No, they are striking it down. In many instances, they interpret it, conclude it cannot stand, and then strike it down. You're merely playing semantics by suggesting "striking down law" does not mean "making a law unenforceable." Why you're doing this, I've no idea, but I'd be willing to guess it's because you want to defend the elementary school notion that the legislature makes, executive applies, and judiciary interprets the law.
Here you can see the Supreme Court itself use the language "strike down" in reference to what it has historically done to many laws.
How the heck did this get modded "insightful"? A freshman's understanding of integration dispels such horsehockey.
Word to ya mothah.
I'm just going to skip to the bottom of the comments and assume there were 27 car analogies, 183 mistaken uses of "patent" or "trademark" instead of "copyright," accusations of "copyright troll," and a not uncommon call for copyright to be abolished.
Fixed that for you.
It's not an ad hominem. The point of criticizing your spelling was to call into question your entire story.
*complains about not getting welfare assistance*
*takes out student loans backed by the federal government*
*ages 40 years*
*draws Social Security*
*complains about socialism*
That's a silly definition of capitalism. Every dollar any government spends is a social service. Defense? Social service. Police? Social service. Etc.
The metric concerning money should not be percentage of the federal budget that is social services expenditures; the metric should be percent of income that is kept by private actors. As capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production and the means of production being operated for private profit. Seeing as how there is no type of income in the United States that is taxed greater than 50%, you'd be hard pressed to refer to the economy as socialist.
Instead, at best, you could call the US a capitalist-socialist hybrid, with it lying on the strong-capitalist side of the continuum (to borrow nomenclature from atheism classification). And, as it turns out, pretty much every country in the world is a capitalist-socialist hybrid lying on the strong-capitalist side. Perhaps there are a couple purely socialist countries or C-S hybrids lying on the strong-socialist side (too lazy to actually do research into exactly what %age of ownership in N. Korea, etc., is private).
But to call the US not capitalist based on the percentage government expenditures that are social services is just plain silly.
I don't get this. Am I just searching for unpopular things? 99% of the time, the first page of results are ALL highly relevant.
AFAIK, foodstamps are available everywhere in the US.
Yeah, but the truth is, you did read his whole comment and chose not to address it. You know it, he knows it, I know it, and all of Slashdot knows it. No one actually stops reading a comment because the first sentence pisses him off, and no amount of verbal tapdancing can hide that universal truth from all us Joe Binaries who have spent decades sitting at a terminal.
So your proposed solution is either (0) no such thing as anthropogenic climate change; (1) let us all die out because we can't help it without regulations, which are worse than mass extinction; or (2) kill every last human except we elite Slashdotters?
Because a climate change "alarmist" cannot persuade people by advocating we slaughter 5bn people from 6bn (or are we at 7bn now?), the only available alternative is to reduce each human's footprint by a factor of 1/6.
If you're going to get that critical about it, how could you not point out that Sarah Palin does not write "God" as "G-d"??!?! ;)
Your definition of "EULA" is not a correct definition. Tell me which of the letters in "EULA" are inapplicable to the GPL.
In what world is "redistribution" not a type of "usage"?
Also, the GPL says "[t]his License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program." Sounds to me like the GPL governs more than just redistribution!
The very reason we don't have this type of system is because the likelihood of being able to catch even 1% of downloaders is slim. I wish I had the case name at my fingertips now, but going on scholar.google.com, you should be able to find cases saying as much when discussing why we have a statutory rate set for infringement penalties instead of the system you describe.
Basically in your system you'd just have everyone pay $5/month to tunnel their traffic through a foreign VPN and swap music with impunity. It's not cost effective to issue the equivalent of a subpoena in a foreign nation to turn over a user's identity for downloading one or two songs and recover $2. But it is sure cost efficient to do what happened here, even if you would have spent $20,000 to get the person's real identity (and even when it sometimes turned out not to be someone subject to your jurisdiction in the first place).
Well the Copyright Act does answer many of these questions already (but not all of them, yes--I actually wrote something of a dissertation on an unsettled issue of copyright law a year or so ago in my last year of law school). The rights you can infringe include public performance, distribution to the public, etc.
In case you're curious, the questions I addressed were, among others, what constitutes commerciality in network streaming situations, what is a distribution, what is a "public" performance, certain novel situations that may or may not be considered "fair use," etc.
At some point I'll get around to publishing the thing or making it available to Slashdot. But when I started working I abandoned final editing.