In that case, perhaps we don't make "theft" of online property a crime, but we allow people to sue in tort for it. Tort has always been the great, equitable equalizer throughout history. Why not permit a suit to be filed in this case, too?
Be careful of slippery slope arguments here. I saw someone above say that treating WoW gold as real could lead to treating avatars as real people. Sure, it could conceivably lead to that result. However, consider this:
Coveting your neighbor's wife is not illegal. However, murder is. Are we not worried that allowing the ninth commandment of the Christian Bible to be broken will lead to allowing the seventh commandment (prohibition on murder) to be broken. It's silly, but conceivable. In fact, I think it is equally conceivable compared with the theft-and-avatar-murder analogy of the person above.
The only reason this presents any novel issue of law is the fact that this is done in a virtual world. We must determine what the nature of the virtual world is (i.e., whether actions in the virtual world count as "real" actions, where actions in the world take place in the real world, if they in fact take place at all, etc.).
Who would have jurisdiction in a case where someone from China plays WoW (say, a server in the US) and kills a Russian player. Which court has jurisdiction? The US, Russia, or China? I would posit that, as the old legal principle of equitable justice says, we should go with what is fairest to all parties involved.
In this case, we have a corporation that (likely) doesn't give a shit about what happened on their servers from a legal standpoint. Thus, we have a Chinese and a Russian player. Well, we (the US, and presumably most other countries) already have legal doctrines that determine where trials take place in international disputes.
I'm perfectly happy with a "theft of WoW gold" offense being merely a tort, not a crime.
If Blizz catches you cheating, and bans you, should you be allowed to sue them for "damages"?
If the contract/license you enter into with Blizzard when setting up the account doesn't waive your right to sue them for such an act (i.e., through a "revocation of service" or "waiver of claims in tort" clause), then you ought to be able to sue them.
Can you give me a good reason why you shouldn't be able to? Don't give me the hogwash about "it's their world." Without a license provision, estoppel should give you the right to sue them. The elements of estoppel are:
Defendant induced an expectation on the part of the Plaintiff
Plaintiff relied on the expectation
Were the expectation false, the Plaintiff would be harmed
It seems to me that in this case, absent a license/contract provision, this would be a textbook example of estoppel.
Except that I have home-burned CDs from 10 years ago that still get read properly. In fact, the only home-burned CD from 10 years ago that doesn't still work for me is one that I scratched something terrible.
Yes, because blink is not defined as conforming in any standard.
Au contraire, "blink" is proper CSS: text-decoration:blink; It is an optional CSS property that is defined as the standard, but browsers are not required to recognize it if they choose not to.
I'd like to point out a possible explanation for why academia is skewed left (considering only the US population) (tenuous though the argument may be): 1) people who are conservatives want to keep their money; thus, 2) they prioritize money; thus, 3) they desire more money; thus, 4) they desire high-paying jobs. 5) Academia pays less than the private sector. Thus, 6) Conservatives tend to go into the private sector. Thus, 7) Liberals are left to fill in the ranks of academia.
I'm not suggesting that it should be an open-and-shut issue. However, many of the signatories of the Constitution were legislators when the definition of "militia" was enacted. It's strong evidence of what "militia" meant at the time of the ratification of the Constitution.
We should do a rewrite of the Constitution.
That's a good sentiment in general. However, we have a way of rewriting the Constitution. It's called "amending," and it's already provided for.
Also, if we rewrite the Constitution, I hope you enjoy Civil War as the middle half of the country fights against the East and West for abortion to be banned by the Constitution. And can you imagine the special interests involved in bribing^Wadvocating for their own interests?
You make two points I disagree with. The first is by far the most important to address:
But your new product would be functionally very similar to the original and a close competititor.
Woah. Since when was open source/FLOSS ever about competition? I thought it was about keeping good code open for people to improve upon!
And if your new software were available for free, yours would likely wipe the other out.
I think the existence of myriad competing products makes that argument demonstrably false. I mean, if all products are "open," then shouldn't we just see the competition of Ubuntu and Debian as proof that even if two products are both freely distributable, one does not wipe the other out? I mean, Ubuntu is "functionally very similar to the original and a close competitor."
Agreed. There's actually a law on the books passed in the 1700s (or very early 1800s?) defining "militia" as every able-bodied male above a certain age in the US.
copyright was essentially invented to stop someone from killing your market for your stuff. (temporarily)
That's a side-result of the real goal, which was to enrich the public domain.
The only goal of copyright is to enrich the public domain:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors . ..
Everything else is a side effect. How to promote the public domain? By incentivizing creation. How to incentivize? By giving creators a temporally-limited monopoly.
If changing copyright length to X promotes the public domain more than the previous length, then it is a good change. Otherwise, it is unconstitutional.
The problem is that the courts are loathe to do such an unwieldy and unscientific calculus. Thus, the decision is left to Congress. Who fail us repeatedly. And then join the Berne Convention, which effectly makes it impossible for copyright to ever be less than death+50. Unless we, of course, become a country that absolutely opposes treaties.
He's changed much more public opinion than you have. I've been to a talk he gave at a large university once. You could hear the audience collective gasp at various points of his speech when he revealed some ridiculous thing the RIAA or MPAA had done. Or Sousa.
His book "Free Culture" turned me into a proponent of much shorter copyright. In short, he changed the mind of one law student. I know he had the same effect on an engineering friend of mine, too.
Reverse engineering is imperfect, isn't it? Or can you get back the original source code in the form of the original code?
I mean, it's hardly equivalent to GPL-protected source code if you can only reverse engineer a gorgeously coded program into shittily-organized and repetitive reversed code.
then look up the history of Presidential Directives and what in history they have changed including overruling the supream court - (freeing of slaves, the march of tears, WWII jap camps to name a few)
I am inclined to disbelieve what you say simply on the basis that: 1. you spelled "Supreme" ridiculously wrong--where did that "a" come from? 2. "jap" is considered racist 3. it's the trail of tears
So you failed on spelling, cultural awareness, and history. Why would you be successful in legal interpretation?
Also note that I overlooked your odd capitalization idiosyncracies because I don't think that reflects poorly on a person like terrible spelling and such do.
And your country rocks for that reason. It's a "gap year," right?
In the US, even taking a year off looks bad. Hell, I'm worried that if I don't have a job within 3 months of graduating from law school, I will never find a good job in the field.
Remember that employers aren't looking at his resume in a vacuum. They're comparing his resume with those of people who DID get good jobs right out of college.
Thus, when trying to make a first cut of whom to expend valuable money on to interview, it is natural to display levels of prejudice. It is important in business to do so.
And for those who will accuse me of being mean or something, I understand his plight. I'm currently trying to get a job for when I graduate from law school, and my GPA is hampering me. I can't take law school exams (which determine 100% of your final grade), but my internship employers all give me glowing reviews, as do professors who know me outside of class.
But employers use GPA as a first-level cutoff. If you're not in the top 25%, no matter how incredibly brilliant you are, you're not getting a top job.
It's not fair on a micro level, but on a macro level it makes sense. Companies spend hundreds of dollars to fly you in and interview you. They don't want to fly in a bunch of bottom-tier students on the off-chance that their GPA indeeeeeed doesn't adequately reflect their brilliance.
Yes to that. Even Air Force JAG (that is "lawyers" for you who are not fans of 1990s television or movies) has to deploy to Iraq or places like that. LAWYERS.
I don't know where you're from, but you don't travel for two years after graduating from college in the US. You start working.
You see, whe have this wonderful culture where, from the time you start college until they time you retire, you have to work your ass off or else you're considered a "loser."
Relevant to your Deltron 3030 comment, I think Slashdotters would love his song Virus.
Secretly plotting your demise I wanna devise a virus to bring dire straits to your environment Crushing corporations with a mild touch Trash the whole computer system and revert you to papyrus
I found a total of 23 spots, across the whole of the 3 movies (12 hours), where I noticed a computer generated artifacts, or the failure for rendering to look lifelike.
And every single one of them was Legolas doing some crazy shit.
"Rule," when speaking of the law, means "legally binding decision." As/.ers were speaking of the law, you really should have known context would have made you look like a dolt.
It's like you saying, "I've an apple stuck in my throat," and when someone performs the Heimlich on you, you say, "No, idiot. An adam's apple. Gosh! Learn alternate definitions, man!"
And the FSF is not considered a form of authority on legal issues. They're no more an authority on the meaning of a contract than the RIAA is on the legal meaning of copyright law.
Wikipedia is self-contradictory and wrong in your cited case. Also from Wikipedia:
However, Luther explicitly rejected transubstantiation, believing that the bread and wine remained fully bread and fully wine while also being fully the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Luther instead emphasized the sacramental union (not exactly the consubstantiation, as it is often claimed).
If some Lutheran sects no longer agree with what Luther wrote, I think by definition they're not Lutheran, right?
Beyond that, the "sacramental union" mentioned in your quote is neither trans- nor con-substantiation.
Either way, all Christians believe in the Zombie Jesus, so you're all nuts as far as I'm concerned.
Either way, all atheists believe in nothing and have no morals, so you're all nuts as far as I'm concerned.
There. See how easy it is to create a strawman or false statement? Christians hardly believe in a zombie Jesus.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, perhaps we don't make "theft" of online property a crime, but we allow people to sue in tort for it. Tort has always been the great, equitable equalizer throughout history. Why not permit a suit to be filed in this case, too?
Be careful of slippery slope arguments here. I saw someone above say that treating WoW gold as real could lead to treating avatars as real people. Sure, it could conceivably lead to that result. However, consider this:
Coveting your neighbor's wife is not illegal. However, murder is. Are we not worried that allowing the ninth commandment of the Christian Bible to be broken will lead to allowing the seventh commandment (prohibition on murder) to be broken. It's silly, but conceivable. In fact, I think it is equally conceivable compared with the theft-and-avatar-murder analogy of the person above.
The only reason this presents any novel issue of law is the fact that this is done in a virtual world. We must determine what the nature of the virtual world is (i.e., whether actions in the virtual world count as "real" actions, where actions in the world take place in the real world, if they in fact take place at all, etc.).
Who would have jurisdiction in a case where someone from China plays WoW (say, a server in the US) and kills a Russian player. Which court has jurisdiction? The US, Russia, or China? I would posit that, as the old legal principle of equitable justice says, we should go with what is fairest to all parties involved.
In this case, we have a corporation that (likely) doesn't give a shit about what happened on their servers from a legal standpoint. Thus, we have a Chinese and a Russian player. Well, we (the US, and presumably most other countries) already have legal doctrines that determine where trials take place in international disputes.
I'm perfectly happy with a "theft of WoW gold" offense being merely a tort, not a crime.
If the contract/license you enter into with Blizzard when setting up the account doesn't waive your right to sue them for such an act (i.e., through a "revocation of service" or "waiver of claims in tort" clause), then you ought to be able to sue them.
Can you give me a good reason why you shouldn't be able to? Don't give me the hogwash about "it's their world." Without a license provision, estoppel should give you the right to sue them. The elements of estoppel are:
It seems to me that in this case, absent a license/contract provision, this would be a textbook example of estoppel.
Except that I have home-burned CDs from 10 years ago that still get read properly. In fact, the only home-burned CD from 10 years ago that doesn't still work for me is one that I scratched something terrible.
Let me get this straight: you embed your file system into copies of portions of your file system? Is that redundant, recursive, or meta?
Au contraire, "blink" is proper CSS:
text-decoration:blink;
It is an optional CSS property that is defined as the standard, but browsers are not required to recognize it if they choose not to.
I'd like to point out a possible explanation for why academia is skewed left (considering only the US population) (tenuous though the argument may be):
1) people who are conservatives want to keep their money; thus,
2) they prioritize money; thus,
3) they desire more money; thus,
4) they desire high-paying jobs.
5) Academia pays less than the private sector. Thus,
6) Conservatives tend to go into the private sector. Thus,
7) Liberals are left to fill in the ranks of academia.
I'm not suggesting that it should be an open-and-shut issue. However, many of the signatories of the Constitution were legislators when the definition of "militia" was enacted. It's strong evidence of what "militia" meant at the time of the ratification of the Constitution.
That's a good sentiment in general. However, we have a way of rewriting the Constitution. It's called "amending," and it's already provided for.
Also, if we rewrite the Constitution, I hope you enjoy Civil War as the middle half of the country fights against the East and West for abortion to be banned by the Constitution. And can you imagine the special interests involved in bribing^Wadvocating for their own interests?
You make two points I disagree with. The first is by far the most important to address:
Woah. Since when was open source/FLOSS ever about competition? I thought it was about keeping good code open for people to improve upon!
I think the existence of myriad competing products makes that argument demonstrably false. I mean, if all products are "open," then shouldn't we just see the competition of Ubuntu and Debian as proof that even if two products are both freely distributable, one does not wipe the other out? I mean, Ubuntu is "functionally very similar to the original and a close competitor."
OP also did NOT state "all of OS X" is open source. OP said "largely" open source.
Agreed. There's actually a law on the books passed in the 1700s (or very early 1800s?) defining "militia" as every able-bodied male above a certain age in the US.
That's a side-result of the real goal, which was to enrich the public domain.
The only goal of copyright is to enrich the public domain:
Everything else is a side effect. How to promote the public domain? By incentivizing creation. How to incentivize? By giving creators a temporally-limited monopoly.
If changing copyright length to X promotes the public domain more than the previous length, then it is a good change. Otherwise, it is unconstitutional.
The problem is that the courts are loathe to do such an unwieldy and unscientific calculus. Thus, the decision is left to Congress. Who fail us repeatedly. And then join the Berne Convention, which effectly makes it impossible for copyright to ever be less than death+50. Unless we, of course, become a country that absolutely opposes treaties.
He's changed much more public opinion than you have. I've been to a talk he gave at a large university once. You could hear the audience collective gasp at various points of his speech when he revealed some ridiculous thing the RIAA or MPAA had done. Or Sousa.
His book "Free Culture" turned me into a proponent of much shorter copyright. In short, he changed the mind of one law student. I know he had the same effect on an engineering friend of mine, too.
Reverse engineering is imperfect, isn't it? Or can you get back the original source code in the form of the original code?
I mean, it's hardly equivalent to GPL-protected source code if you can only reverse engineer a gorgeously coded program into shittily-organized and repetitive reversed code.
I am inclined to disbelieve what you say simply on the basis that:
1. you spelled "Supreme" ridiculously wrong--where did that "a" come from?
2. "jap" is considered racist
3. it's the trail of tears
So you failed on spelling, cultural awareness, and history. Why would you be successful in legal interpretation?
Also note that I overlooked your odd capitalization idiosyncracies because I don't think that reflects poorly on a person like terrible spelling and such do.
And your country rocks for that reason. It's a "gap year," right?
In the US, even taking a year off looks bad. Hell, I'm worried that if I don't have a job within 3 months of graduating from law school, I will never find a good job in the field.
Remember that employers aren't looking at his resume in a vacuum. They're comparing his resume with those of people who DID get good jobs right out of college.
Thus, when trying to make a first cut of whom to expend valuable money on to interview, it is natural to display levels of prejudice. It is important in business to do so.
And for those who will accuse me of being mean or something, I understand his plight. I'm currently trying to get a job for when I graduate from law school, and my GPA is hampering me. I can't take law school exams (which determine 100% of your final grade), but my internship employers all give me glowing reviews, as do professors who know me outside of class.
But employers use GPA as a first-level cutoff. If you're not in the top 25%, no matter how incredibly brilliant you are, you're not getting a top job.
It's not fair on a micro level, but on a macro level it makes sense. Companies spend hundreds of dollars to fly you in and interview you. They don't want to fly in a bunch of bottom-tier students on the off-chance that their GPA indeeeeeed doesn't adequately reflect their brilliance.
Yes to that. Even Air Force JAG (that is "lawyers" for you who are not fans of 1990s television or movies) has to deploy to Iraq or places like that. LAWYERS.
I don't know where you're from, but you don't travel for two years after graduating from college in the US. You start working.
You see, whe have this wonderful culture where, from the time you start college until they time you retire, you have to work your ass off or else you're considered a "loser."
Very bad analogy. Professionals don't work chainsaws for aural enjoyment. They do it to cut down trees.
Now, if you said that professional with chainsaws are skillful, but you don't use the paper derived from such trees, your analogy would be more apt.
Relevant to your Deltron 3030 comment, I think Slashdotters would love his song Virus.
Secretly plotting your demise
I wanna devise a virus
to bring dire straits to your environment
Crushing corporations with a mild touch
Trash the whole computer system and revert you to papyrus
And every single one of them was Legolas doing some crazy shit.
"Rule," when speaking of the law, means "legally binding decision." As /.ers were speaking of the law, you really should have known context would have made you look like a dolt.
It's like you saying, "I've an apple stuck in my throat," and when someone performs the Heimlich on you, you say, "No, idiot. An adam's apple. Gosh! Learn alternate definitions, man!"
And the FSF is not considered a form of authority on legal issues. They're no more an authority on the meaning of a contract than the RIAA is on the legal meaning of copyright law.
DAMN you AND YOUR IMPENETRABLE CAVE OF NONSENSE, PeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeRL!!!
Somehow I don't think this is relevant to the infamous HDDVD number.
That's kinda hard, seeing as how you can't issue a DMCA takedown notice against a nonexistent writing. Therefore, the restraint is not prior.
Wikipedia is self-contradictory and wrong in your cited case. Also from Wikipedia:
If some Lutheran sects no longer agree with what Luther wrote, I think by definition they're not Lutheran, right?
Beyond that, the "sacramental union" mentioned in your quote is neither trans- nor con-substantiation.
Either way, all atheists believe in nothing and have no morals, so you're all nuts as far as I'm concerned.
There. See how easy it is to create a strawman or false statement? Christians hardly believe in a zombie Jesus.