Again, tragedy of the commons has nothing to do with government ownership and everything to do with things everyone has free access to (e.g., airwaves, which no one can physically exclude another person from, unlike, say, a diamond ring you can lock in a safe). In other words, things everyone owns by default (air, rainwater, etc.).
Up to the market to decide
And when Clear Channel and the rest of the large media groups who would control the private sector's "airwaves frequency assignment body" decide never to allow a small company to broadcast over the airwaves?
Gov't shouldn't own assets, there should be no commons. No commons = no tragedy. Everything must be private.
I don't think you understand what "commons" means. "Commons" is that which is shared among all people. Air(waves) is one of these.
If the airwaves were not regulated, you'd have Clear Channel pumping radio on every frequency to block out all competitors. You'd have competitors doing the same thing. You'd have no functioning radio. Or cellphones. Or wifi. Or anything that uses wireless, really.
And before you say that the airwaves would be privately owned, first of all, how would that work? You'd need government enforcing property rights in airwaves. This sounds exactly like what we have now. Without government enforcement (i.e., "regulation"), no one could use the airwaves.
So when the government announces in advance its troop movements in wartime, and the enemy bombs the region and we lose the war, THANK GOD WE DIDN'T KEEP A SECRET.
You're an ideologue trapped in a universe where pragmatism is necessary.
Many prefer the old format (present the public with raw data and allow them to decide), Assange should be acting as curator, not hype or spin man.
Journalistic impartiality is 100% impossible. Even by selecting which news to report (as you must, since resources are finite), you display bias. Do you spend your $ to report on the atrocities in Darfur, or do you talk about the Iraqi conflict in-depth? Selecting one over the other is a bias. You think either Iraq or Sudan is more important than the other.
CEO's of major league corporations are not very confident and controlling.
They are often not very controlling. Of course, "controlling" in this conversation is pretty obviously supposedly to mean "micromanaging."
Most leaders of large organizations are excellent at one thing: delegating to other talented, trusted individuals. They usually cannot micromanage such a large organization due to finite resources.
That this fact escapes you has left me flabbergasted.
So you are in agreement that a larger, more powerful outside force should use their power to force sovereigns to meet their demands and social mores or die.
Do you think a nation has the right, as a sovereign, to commit internal genocide?
If not, then there has to be a larger, more powerful outside force to stop them. There's just a disagreement as to how minimal the, say, "crime against humanity" has to be before the larger force may intervene.
If you do believe the nation has the right to commit genocide, I think you're a monster or someone more obsessed with philosophical symmetry than with pragmatic results (which likely does not bother you).
I just wanted to expose you one way or the other.:)
I used to live in Kanagawa. Kanagawa is the prefecture bordering Tokyo. I was studying at a university in Tokyo. As such, I had the opportunity to shop there a few times.
Call me a buzzkill, but Akiba is not that impressive in my opinion. The arthouses along the border of the sub-city (??) were way more impressive.
Akihabara just feels like a city made out of Fry'ses.
Or you could think of the contract between you and Facebook as creating a political subdivision of the US, subservient to municipal, state, and national law. It controls the behavior of its citizenry (you and Facebook), but not those superior to it (a city, state, and nation).
Getting the info from Facebook is just faster than subpoenaing your Facebook friends and compelling them to testify about what they saw there.
And before someone complains that this would be inadmissible in court due to the rules barring hearsay, statements made against interest are by definition not hearsay in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In some states, I know for a fact it is by definition not hearsay. In other states, I would wager it is the same, or is at least an exception to the rule barring hearsay.
In suits against corporations, records and evidence are always the first thing to be destroyed.
Unless the lawsuit would be catastrophic to the company, it knows better than to destroy records. We have this lovely thing in the American jurisprudential systems. It is embodied as the Latin phrase "omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem." Assume all against the spoiler.
In effect, it means that if you know a record was destroyed, you can assume basically the worst against the person who destroyed it.
Because of this rule, most of the time a company will not dare to delete records. Unless, of course, as I said above, it would be catastrophic to the company.
Actually, if you had read the URL you had linked to, you'd find that you're making an erroneous assumption.
How does it work?
A person using CC0 . . . waives all of his or her copyright and neighboring and related rights in a work, to the fullest extent permitted by law. If the waiver isn’t effective for any reason, then CC0 acts as a license from the affirmer granting the public an unconditional, irrevocable, non exclusive, royalty free license to use the work for any purpose.
What kinds of rights am I waiving when I use CC0?
. . . In [some] jurisdictions, you may not be able to waive all of your copyright . . . rights. . . . When waiver isn’t possible, those rights are licensed under CC0 to the extent allowed by law, although again, sometimes those rights cannot be licensed in advance or at all.
So the CC0 essentially acts as a license that accomplishes the same goals as the public domain.
Indeed, the founder of the Creative Commons, Larry Lessig, has said that placing something into the public domain in the US is very difficult, and so the CC has created a license that accomplishes the same goals.
I call bullshit. This is the first time EVER (seriously) I've read anything like that and I think I know quite a lot about IP and licensing.
Do you know of any US law that forbids the author from WAIVING his/her copyrights? What happens after he/she waives the rights? The work should be instantly in the public domain! Refute my arguments, please.
I remember attending a Larry Lessig talk. He said that US copyright law makes it very difficult to place a work into the public domain intentionally. IIRC, he said there has to be some sort of physical conveyance to do so.
This is why there is a Creative Commons Public Domain license: to mimic what happens when a work enters the public domain, but without the work actually entering the public domain.
In Eldredge vs. Ashcroft, the US Supreme Court got around this by saying that the author, when creating his work, has in mind the knowledge that Congress may retroactively extend copyright. This is an added carrot to get a creator to create.
Now, everyone but the few on the SCOTUS who signed on realize this is a horseshit post hoc rationalization.
Has everybody in power forgotten the whole frapping point of copyright??
To be fair, that's only in the US. France, for example, recognizes "moral rights" in copyright, which definitely do not spring from a utilitarian copyright basis like US copyright law is supposed to.
To address your question specifically: Because this would be a contract between the publisher and the wholesaler/vendor attempting to bind a third party (the purchaser), which is not permitted in contract law in general.
I'm not an expert in this area, but I think in general in a book, since it's static, a EULA printed in the cover would be construed as between the publisher and wholesaler/vendor. It would not be a "reoffering" between the publisher and reader.
But in general, I'm not sure if there's anything stopping book publishers from doing something similar except that the moneyed interests involved are balanced differently, which puts pressure on publishers not to do something like that.
I don't think Vernor would have standing to challenge the validity of the initial EULA because he does not have privity of contract. He raised several defenses in this case, and only one seems to even touch on this issue. But I've tried to understand his argument there, and it just doesn't seem like it's an attack on the shrinkwrap license.
So no, I don't think it is relevant, as I don't think it was at issue.
(This is, admittedly, a facet of contract law that I'm not an expert on.)
What all this ignores is that publishers' attempts to put restrictions on books was what CAUSED the creation of the "first sale doctrine" in the first place.
I don't know what it is with some of these court decisions lately, but it's almost like in the last few years the judges have turned into a bunch of morons who ignore precedent and have never picked up a history book.
In that case, Bobbs-Merill sold books to wholesalers their copyrighted book including a "shrinkwrap" license saying retailers shall not sell the book below a certain price. Wholesalers sold the books to retailers. Retailers sold the books below the certain price to consumers. The Court held that the license was not binding upon the retailers because there was no privity of contract between the retailers and Bobbs-Merill. This is true: there was only privity of contract between Bobbs-Merill and the wholesalers. And as the license only purported to bind retailers, the wholesalers did not violate the terms of the license either.
However, the case at hand is distinguishable. Here, CTA initially installed the Autodesk software. However, as part of the installation process, CTA agreed not to resale the software. As the sale was from Autodesk to CTA initially, there was privity of contract. Thus, the license is enforceable against CTA.
CTA later resold the software in violation of this agreement. This revokes CTA's license, which means the copies Vernor sold on eBay were unlicensed, infringing copies from the moment he purchased them. When he sold them, he also infringed. This is textbook copyright law. Read the first few sections of 17 USC to verify. I'm honestly too lazy to pull up a citation for something extremely uncontroversial in an otherwise engaging discussion on/.
This case would only be analogous to Bobbs-Merill if the license in that case had forbidden the wholesalers from doing something, and the wholesalers had violated the license. Had the wholesalers violated the license, any copies sold to the defendants subsequent to the violation would have been infringing, and the first-sale doctrine would not have applied.
If you have any questions, please respond. At first glance, the Autodesk case appears to be a rehash of the Bobbs-Merill case. However, Bobbs-Merill turned on privity of contract, while the Autodesk case turns on sales of unlicensed software. Privity is merely tangential to the Autodesk case.
Seeing as how it is very difficult to explain things and make legal arguments on/. in this tiny <TEXTAREA>, I've undoubtedly not been clear enough in my explanation. Hopefully I have, but if I have not, I hope someone points it out so I have the chance to clarify.
It also appears to ignore the issue of "shrink wrap" licensing, which violates the very basic principles of contract law, and which has never been found to be binding by any major court to date.
Well, it ignores the shrinkwrap issue because it's wholly irrelevant to the case.
To explicate by way of analogy: If you buy an infringing CD (illegal copy made by Son May in Asia, for example) and sell it to someone else, you have committed copyright infringement even if you did not know the CD was infringing. Similarly, Vernor (the Autodesk defendant) bought an already infringing copy and resold it. He therefore did commit copyright infringement, regardless of his knowledge of infringement.
We can argue the merits of mens rea-less infringement on moral/ethical grounds, but the law is clear on that issue right now: you don't have to know you're infringing to infringe.
Think of it like instead of going to the lunch buffet and cramming everything into one plate, you go up to the buffet three times with three plates: one for salad, one for main course and one for dessert. With a little processing (trips) you end up with more range (food variety).
I'm still a little confused. Could you please provide me with a car analogy?
In any country with sane laws, that's considered to be criminal, because it uses more than reasonable force to counter the offense. If someone tries to punch you in the face, you cannot kill them for it. Same with breaking into your house to steal your TV -- it's not a crime punishable by death.
You assume the guy living in the house has 100% knowledge of the intruder's intent. Thank God you aren't my government rep or a Supreme Court justice.
If someone breaks into my house at night, they're getting shot. I have a family to take care of, and I don't need some liberal "this is disproportionate" feelgood bullshit giving the intruder (who may be a serial rapist or murderer for all I know) to murder my wife or rape my daughter.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, tragedy of the commons has nothing to do with government ownership and everything to do with things everyone has free access to (e.g., airwaves, which no one can physically exclude another person from, unlike, say, a diamond ring you can lock in a safe). In other words, things everyone owns by default (air, rainwater, etc.).
And when Clear Channel and the rest of the large media groups who would control the private sector's "airwaves frequency assignment body" decide never to allow a small company to broadcast over the airwaves?
I don't think you understand what "commons" means. "Commons" is that which is shared among all people. Air(waves) is one of these.
If the airwaves were not regulated, you'd have Clear Channel pumping radio on every frequency to block out all competitors. You'd have competitors doing the same thing. You'd have no functioning radio. Or cellphones. Or wifi. Or anything that uses wireless, really.
Tragedy of the Commons.
And before you say that the airwaves would be privately owned, first of all, how would that work? You'd need government enforcing property rights in airwaves. This sounds exactly like what we have now. Without government enforcement (i.e., "regulation"), no one could use the airwaves.
Not a fan of interstates? Do you think the US would have been better off without them?
Are you familiar with the tragedy of the commons? How do you think anything using public airwaves would work without government regulation?
Of course, that immediately succeeded years of human cattle that was the laissez-faire Gilded Age.
How do you feel about roads and the fire department?
So when the government announces in advance its troop movements in wartime, and the enemy bombs the region and we lose the war, THANK GOD WE DIDN'T KEEP A SECRET.
You're an ideologue trapped in a universe where pragmatism is necessary.
Journalistic impartiality is 100% impossible. Even by selecting which news to report (as you must, since resources are finite), you display bias. Do you spend your $ to report on the atrocities in Darfur, or do you talk about the Iraqi conflict in-depth?
Selecting one over the other is a bias. You think either Iraq or Sudan is more important than the other.
They are often not very controlling. Of course, "controlling" in this conversation is pretty obviously supposedly to mean "micromanaging."
Most leaders of large organizations are excellent at one thing: delegating to other talented, trusted individuals. They usually cannot micromanage such a large organization due to finite resources.
That this fact escapes you has left me flabbergasted.
I am Lrrr, ruler of the planet Omicron Persei 8. Take me to your single, female lawyer!
Do you think a nation has the right, as a sovereign, to commit internal genocide?
If not, then there has to be a larger, more powerful outside force to stop them. There's just a disagreement as to how minimal the, say, "crime against humanity" has to be before the larger force may intervene.
If you do believe the nation has the right to commit genocide, I think you're a monster or someone more obsessed with philosophical symmetry than with pragmatic results (which likely does not bother you).
I just wanted to expose you one way or the other. :)
I used to live in Kanagawa. Kanagawa is the prefecture bordering Tokyo. I was studying at a university in Tokyo. As such, I had the opportunity to shop there a few times.
Call me a buzzkill, but Akiba is not that impressive in my opinion. The arthouses along the border of the sub-city (??) were way more impressive.
Akihabara just feels like a city made out of Fry'ses.
That's selective bias. You only hear about the companies that do stupid stuff.
You don't hear about the tons of lawsuits every year where the companies don't destroy evidence.
Or you could think of the contract between you and Facebook as creating a political subdivision of the US, subservient to municipal, state, and national law. It controls the behavior of its citizenry (you and Facebook), but not those superior to it (a city, state, and nation).
And before someone complains that this would be inadmissible in court due to the rules barring hearsay, statements made against interest are by definition not hearsay in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In some states, I know for a fact it is by definition not hearsay. In other states, I would wager it is the same, or is at least an exception to the rule barring hearsay.
Unless the lawsuit would be catastrophic to the company, it knows better than to destroy records. We have this lovely thing in the American jurisprudential systems. It is embodied as the Latin phrase "omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem." Assume all against the spoiler.
In effect, it means that if you know a record was destroyed, you can assume basically the worst against the person who destroyed it.
Because of this rule, most of the time a company will not dare to delete records. Unless, of course, as I said above, it would be catastrophic to the company.
Then I'm sure you'll be happy to hear that in most cases, discovery is very limited.
Actually, if you had read the URL you had linked to, you'd find that you're making an erroneous assumption.
So the CC0 essentially acts as a license that accomplishes the same goals as the public domain.
Indeed, the founder of the Creative Commons, Larry Lessig, has said that placing something into the public domain in the US is very difficult, and so the CC has created a license that accomplishes the same goals.
I remember attending a Larry Lessig talk. He said that US copyright law makes it very difficult to place a work into the public domain intentionally. IIRC, he said there has to be some sort of physical conveyance to do so.
This is why there is a Creative Commons Public Domain license: to mimic what happens when a work enters the public domain, but without the work actually entering the public domain.
In Eldredge vs. Ashcroft, the US Supreme Court got around this by saying that the author, when creating his work, has in mind the knowledge that Congress may retroactively extend copyright. This is an added carrot to get a creator to create.
Now, everyone but the few on the SCOTUS who signed on realize this is a horseshit post hoc rationalization.
To be fair, that's only in the US. France, for example, recognizes "moral rights" in copyright, which definitely do not spring from a utilitarian copyright basis like US copyright law is supposed to.
To address your question specifically: Because this would be a contract between the publisher and the wholesaler/vendor attempting to bind a third party (the purchaser), which is not permitted in contract law in general.
I'm not an expert in this area, but I think in general in a book, since it's static, a EULA printed in the cover would be construed as between the publisher and wholesaler/vendor. It would not be a "reoffering" between the publisher and reader.
But in general, I'm not sure if there's anything stopping book publishers from doing something similar except that the moneyed interests involved are balanced differently, which puts pressure on publishers not to do something like that.
The facts of the opinion reveal that AutoDesk did sell the software directly to CTA. No wholesaler, no distributer.
I don't think Vernor would have standing to challenge the validity of the initial EULA because he does not have privity of contract. He raised several defenses in this case, and only one seems to even touch on this issue. But I've tried to understand his argument there, and it just doesn't seem like it's an attack on the shrinkwrap license.
So no, I don't think it is relevant, as I don't think it was at issue.
(This is, admittedly, a facet of contract law that I'm not an expert on.)
To be fair, you're wrong that this case is exactly like Bobbs-Merill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339 (1908), the case that created the first-sale doctrine.
In that case, Bobbs-Merill sold books to wholesalers their copyrighted book including a "shrinkwrap" license saying retailers shall not sell the book below a certain price. Wholesalers sold the books to retailers. Retailers sold the books below the certain price to consumers. The Court held that the license was not binding upon the retailers because there was no privity of contract between the retailers and Bobbs-Merill. This is true: there was only privity of contract between Bobbs-Merill and the wholesalers. And as the license only purported to bind retailers, the wholesalers did not violate the terms of the license either.
However, the case at hand is distinguishable. Here, CTA initially installed the Autodesk software. However, as part of the installation process, CTA agreed not to resale the software. As the sale was from Autodesk to CTA initially, there was privity of contract. Thus, the license is enforceable against CTA.
CTA later resold the software in violation of this agreement. This revokes CTA's license, which means the copies Vernor sold on eBay were unlicensed, infringing copies from the moment he purchased them. When he sold them, he also infringed. This is textbook copyright law. Read the first few sections of 17 USC to verify. I'm honestly too lazy to pull up a citation for something extremely uncontroversial in an otherwise engaging discussion on /.
This case would only be analogous to Bobbs-Merill if the license in that case had forbidden the wholesalers from doing something, and the wholesalers had violated the license. Had the wholesalers violated the license, any copies sold to the defendants subsequent to the violation would have been infringing, and the first-sale doctrine would not have applied.
If you have any questions, please respond. At first glance, the Autodesk case appears to be a rehash of the Bobbs-Merill case. However, Bobbs-Merill turned on privity of contract, while the Autodesk case turns on sales of unlicensed software. Privity is merely tangential to the Autodesk case.
Seeing as how it is very difficult to explain things and make legal arguments on /. in this tiny <TEXTAREA>, I've undoubtedly not been clear enough in my explanation. Hopefully I have, but if I have not, I hope someone points it out so I have the chance to clarify.
Well, it ignores the shrinkwrap issue because it's wholly irrelevant to the case.
To explicate by way of analogy: If you buy an infringing CD (illegal copy made by Son May in Asia, for example) and sell it to someone else, you have committed copyright infringement even if you did not know the CD was infringing. Similarly, Vernor (the Autodesk defendant) bought an already infringing copy and resold it. He therefore did commit copyright infringement, regardless of his knowledge of infringement.
We can argue the merits of mens rea-less infringement on moral/ethical grounds, but the law is clear on that issue right now: you don't have to know you're infringing to infringe.
I'm still a little confused. Could you please provide me with a car analogy?
You assume the guy living in the house has 100% knowledge of the intruder's intent. Thank God you aren't my government rep or a Supreme Court justice.
If someone breaks into my house at night, they're getting shot. I have a family to take care of, and I don't need some liberal "this is disproportionate" feelgood bullshit giving the intruder (who may be a serial rapist or murderer for all I know) to murder my wife or rape my daughter.