Legality is irrelevant unless you go to court. There is about 0% chance of any creative commons contributor suing eBay over this, and even if they did, they would be unlikely to prevail. It is hard to show monetary damage from diminished "sales" of a free product, and eBay is not the party doing the infringing. They are just providing a marketplace.
I have considered creating a small one in the past. Not too much paperwork, but the lawyer wanted paying.
You do NOT need a lawyer to form a corporation. You can start a corporation on-line for about $200, in about 30 minutes. I own four: One California corp, one Nevada corp, one Delaware corp, and one company in the Cayman Islands. All except for the California corp are just private mailboxes, but they are still useful for shuffling money around to minimize taxes. Unless you make all your money on a W-2, you are foolish not to incorporate at least once.
It is also nice to take a vacation to the Caribbean, and write it off on my taxes as a business expense. All I have to do is schedule a board meeting, with only myself as sole board member in attendance. I don't even need to rent a meeting room, since there is no law that the meeting can't be held on the beach.
...they could put a ton of people out of work in the transportation industry, enrich a few corporations, and further wreck the economy through knock-on effects as the unemployed push wages down
Maybe people could spend their copious free time reading about economic fallacies. Or we could just pay the unemployed to throw rocks through windows to generate jobs for glaziers.
If the corpses are embalmed and buried, they would be a net carbon sink. If they are cremated, the carbon would be returned to the atmosphere, at least until crematoriums adopt CSS.
But they were NOT "scraping" the designs. They were downloading the design files directly, using an interface set up for exactly that purpose. Do you call it "scraping" when someone uses Github? This is no different. The downloading was perfectly legal, and there is no technical barrier to them, or anyone, who wants to do so. The (possibly) illegal part was the selling, not the downloading.
Note: What JustPrint3D was doing may not actually be illegal. Anti-trust laws in America prohibit a manufacturer or distributor from fixing prices. They cannot require a downstream retailer to sell above a minimum price, or below a maximum price. What is not clear, and has not been tested in the courts, is whether anti-trust laws apply when the cost is zero. Can an author or designer require that their product be free? The law is unsettled. IANAL.
Seriously what makes a better company. Paying the employees who work for a living more or paying the cep another 2 million in compensation on top of his 10 million a year?
Was Apple successful because of Steve Jobs, or because they had better assembly line workers than their competitors?
The janitors generally work harder and longer hours than CEOs.
Unless armed, (semi-)autonomous robots are a primary tool of the dictator's oppression.
What would be the point? In America, the bottom quintile of households already get 40% of their income from redistribution. In a post-scarcity economy, they could be bought off even more cheaply, and live much better, with no net tax increase on the rich.
The same big names will provide clean and renewable energy in the future.
Maybe not. If batteries are cheap, and solar panels are cheap, then I can just have my own batteries and panels. So why do I need to buy energy from a "big company"? In my neighborhood, I already see dozens of houses with solar panels. Imagine how many will have them when they actually make sense!
Yeah, like I can realistically stop doing business with my health-insurance company or the company that invests my pension fund.
I have a choice of several health insurance companies. I have a choice of hundreds of investment companies.
On the other hand, I also have a choice of countries to live in. I lived in China for a while, and really liked it there, but my wife (who is Chinese) prefers America, so here we are.
I think it's talking about gut bacteria and using highly resistant beneficial bacteria to prevent harmful bacteria moving in
No. The summary is so badly written that hard to tell what it is about, but the researchers tricked the mouse immune system into suppressing gut viruses so that the beneficial bacteria could recover faster after antibiotics. Here is a link to the paper.
This argument always breaks down when the person making it is asked to provide actual alternatives.
It also breaks down when you look at actual use cases. For many people, compatibility and ecosystem are far more important than performance. My use case: A classroom full of 4-6 graders, and a bunch of SD-Cards, electronic components, and prototype boards. The RPi "just works". It boots Linux, there are lots and lots of online tutorials, sample code, and projects that kids can do. The only other board that comes close is Arduino, and we use those too, but it can't do the same high level stuff as a RPi, such as running a webserver.
Huh, never realised Li was so rare. That "not made directly by stars" line in the wiki entry seems a bit suspect, though. Strains belief that at no point in the core of a star, a He ever captures a neutron or proton or deuteron.
The problem is that lithium is both rarely produced, and rapidly consumed. Lithium can absorb neutrons, and can also absorb protons (Li7 + H = 2He4). Lithium reacts so easily that it is used as a major component in thermonuclear weapons. When a star forms, Lithium is one of the first elements consumed and depleted from the core. Citation: Lithium burning.
The frack wells are not being abandoned. The price of oil is still above the marginal cost of pumping from an existing well. Some frackers are even continuing to drill new wells. The technology is advancing rapidly, and the breakeven price is falling. Cheap oil is here to stay.
No. As your own citation explains, a "loss leader" means something different. A loss leader is an item priced low to draw customers to your business, so that you can sell them additional or alternative products. Example: Razor blade companies price the razor low to make money on blades, not to drive razor companies out of the market.
No. GP is mistaken. There are not 22 million kg, there are ~22 million metric tons, or a thousand times as much. So the limit would be 2 billion cars. But there is an additional 230 billion metric tons of lithium in the ocean, enough for 20 trillion cars.
"Dumping" is just another way to say, "cut prices".
"Dumping" means selling below the cost of production, usually with the aim of driving competitors out of the market.
Dumping is hard to prove, and most accusations of dumping are just whining about competition. Saudi Arabia is NOT dumping because their cost of production is extremely low. They are still making a profit on every barrel they sell. Their objectives are more geopolitical than economic anyway, aimed at Iran and Russia, with Venezuela and American frackers as collateral damage.
Nonsense. If you actually believe that, you should get a passport and go to Shenzhen. There is factory after factory, about 100m apart. There are plenty of options, and labor is in short supply.
16 hours a day for a few pennies
More nonsense. A typical factory worker in Shenzhen earns about $30 for an 8 hour day. Many work overtime, but no one is required to. In surveys, the factory workers biggest complaint is that they want to work LONGER hours, so they can earn more money faster. Many of them are women separated from their children back on the farm, trying to earn as much money as they can, as quickly as they can, so they can go back home to their families. Stop trying to project your values onto people you don't understand, who have very different priorities.
under the worst possible working conditions
Chinese factories are nowhere "the worst". They are far better than the farm jobs these people left behind.
and living in a barracks next to the factory.
The dormitories are provided as a convenience for migrant workers. No one is required to live in them, and many do not.
Just because all the companies do it doesn't mean it's good.
It also doesn't mean it is bad. Over the last 30 years, factory jobs in China have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. Anyone who thinks that is "bad", has never done 16 hours of stoop labor in a mosquito infested rice paddy. Because, for most of these people, that is the alternative.
It is absurd to call it "slave labor" just because a flabby white American wouldn't want the job.
Corporations are bound to obey the laws of the countries in which they operate. Apples argument against the FBI subpoena is not that it is wrong, but that it is illegal. In China, they cannot make that argument. China is an authoritarian country, and that is not something that is going to be changed by Apple, or any other American corporation. It is not their role to "fix" China. The Chinese people need to do that for themselves.
It's a former employer (I think I mentioned that in the question).
That doesn't matter. An email is good enough. If it goes through a "standard" email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, whatever) then it is a lot harder to forge and back-date an email than a formal written letter, and it will thus carry greater weight in court.
You: Can I release blah blah? Them: Sure, go ahead. That is ALL you need.
Slashdot Mirror
We're discussing legality here.
Legality is irrelevant unless you go to court. There is about 0% chance of any creative commons contributor suing eBay over this, and even if they did, they would be unlikely to prevail. It is hard to show monetary damage from diminished "sales" of a free product, and eBay is not the party doing the infringing. They are just providing a marketplace.
I have considered creating a small one in the past. Not too much paperwork, but the lawyer wanted paying.
You do NOT need a lawyer to form a corporation. You can start a corporation on-line for about $200, in about 30 minutes. I own four: One California corp, one Nevada corp, one Delaware corp, and one company in the Cayman Islands. All except for the California corp are just private mailboxes, but they are still useful for shuffling money around to minimize taxes. Unless you make all your money on a W-2, you are foolish not to incorporate at least once.
It is also nice to take a vacation to the Caribbean, and write it off on my taxes as a business expense. All I have to do is schedule a board meeting, with only myself as sole board member in attendance. I don't even need to rent a meeting room, since there is no law that the meeting can't be held on the beach.
...they could put a ton of people out of work in the transportation industry, enrich a few corporations, and further wreck the economy through knock-on effects as the unemployed push wages down
Maybe people could spend their copious free time reading about economic fallacies. Or we could just pay the unemployed to throw rocks through windows to generate jobs for glaziers.
Not to mention the jobs those corpses created.
If the corpses are embalmed and buried, they would be a net carbon sink. If they are cremated, the carbon would be returned to the atmosphere, at least until crematoriums adopt CSS.
But they were NOT "scraping" the designs. They were downloading the design files directly, using an interface set up for exactly that purpose. Do you call it "scraping" when someone uses Github? This is no different. The downloading was perfectly legal, and there is no technical barrier to them, or anyone, who wants to do so. The (possibly) illegal part was the selling, not the downloading.
Note: What JustPrint3D was doing may not actually be illegal. Anti-trust laws in America prohibit a manufacturer or distributor from fixing prices. They cannot require a downstream retailer to sell above a minimum price, or below a maximum price. What is not clear, and has not been tested in the courts, is whether anti-trust laws apply when the cost is zero. Can an author or designer require that their product be free? The law is unsettled. IANAL.
Ebay only takes action against illegal things when there is bad press.
That is a smart and effective policy. There is no competitive advantage in being ethical if nobody notices.
Seriously what makes a better company. Paying the employees who work for a living more or paying the cep another 2 million in compensation on top of his 10 million a year?
Was Apple successful because of Steve Jobs, or because they had better assembly line workers than their competitors?
The janitors generally work harder and longer hours than CEOs.
Subsistence farmers in Africa work even harder.
Unless armed, (semi-)autonomous robots are a primary tool of the dictator's oppression.
What would be the point? In America, the bottom quintile of households already get 40% of their income from redistribution. In a post-scarcity economy, they could be bought off even more cheaply, and live much better, with no net tax increase on the rich.
In a world without labor cost, the only cost will be from the energy used to create the thing.
In a world without labor cost, where robots can produce windmills, solar panels, and geothermal plants, even energy will have near zero cost.
The same big names will provide clean and renewable energy in the future.
Maybe not. If batteries are cheap, and solar panels are cheap, then I can just have my own batteries and panels. So why do I need to buy energy from a "big company"? In my neighborhood, I already see dozens of houses with solar panels. Imagine how many will have them when they actually make sense!
Yeah, like I can realistically stop doing business with my health-insurance company or the company that invests my pension fund.
I have a choice of several health insurance companies. I have a choice of hundreds of investment companies.
On the other hand, I also have a choice of countries to live in. I lived in China for a while, and really liked it there, but my wife (who is Chinese) prefers America, so here we are.
I think it's talking about gut bacteria and using highly resistant beneficial bacteria to prevent harmful bacteria moving in
No. The summary is so badly written that hard to tell what it is about, but the researchers tricked the mouse immune system into suppressing gut viruses so that the beneficial bacteria could recover faster after antibiotics. Here is a link to the paper.
But what is a "Poop transplant"?
Fecal bacteriotherapy
This argument always breaks down when the person making it is asked to provide actual alternatives.
It also breaks down when you look at actual use cases. For many people, compatibility and ecosystem are far more important than performance. My use case: A classroom full of 4-6 graders, and a bunch of SD-Cards, electronic components, and prototype boards. The RPi "just works". It boots Linux, there are lots and lots of online tutorials, sample code, and projects that kids can do. The only other board that comes close is Arduino, and we use those too, but it can't do the same high level stuff as a RPi, such as running a webserver.
Huh, never realised Li was so rare. That "not made directly by stars" line in the wiki entry seems a bit suspect, though. Strains belief that at no point in the core of a star, a He ever captures a neutron or proton or deuteron.
The problem is that lithium is both rarely produced, and rapidly consumed. Lithium can absorb neutrons, and can also absorb protons (Li7 + H = 2He4). Lithium reacts so easily that it is used as a major component in thermonuclear weapons. When a star forms, Lithium is one of the first elements consumed and depleted from the core. Citation: Lithium burning.
What becomes of an abandoned frack well?
The frack wells are not being abandoned. The price of oil is still above the marginal cost of pumping from an existing well. Some frackers are even continuing to drill new wells. The technology is advancing rapidly, and the breakeven price is falling. Cheap oil is here to stay.
There is another term for that: "loss leaders".
No. As your own citation explains, a "loss leader" means something different. A loss leader is an item priced low to draw customers to your business, so that you can sell them additional or alternative products. Example: Razor blade companies price the razor low to make money on blades, not to drive razor companies out of the market.
Third most common element in the universe ?
No. Not even close. Oxygen is the 3rd most common element in the universe. Lithium is not even in the top twenty.
Citation: Abundance of elements
So you'll limit the car pool to 2 millions car ?
No. GP is mistaken. There are not 22 million kg, there are ~22 million metric tons, or a thousand times as much. So the limit would be 2 billion cars. But there is an additional 230 billion metric tons of lithium in the ocean, enough for 20 trillion cars.
"Dumping" is just another way to say, "cut prices".
"Dumping" means selling below the cost of production, usually with the aim of driving competitors out of the market.
Dumping is hard to prove, and most accusations of dumping are just whining about competition. Saudi Arabia is NOT dumping because their cost of production is extremely low. They are still making a profit on every barrel they sell. Their objectives are more geopolitical than economic anyway, aimed at Iran and Russia, with Venezuela and American frackers as collateral damage.
If you want a job, you have exactly one choice
Nonsense. If you actually believe that, you should get a passport and go to Shenzhen. There is factory after factory, about 100m apart. There are plenty of options, and labor is in short supply.
16 hours a day for a few pennies
More nonsense. A typical factory worker in Shenzhen earns about $30 for an 8 hour day. Many work overtime, but no one is required to. In surveys, the factory workers biggest complaint is that they want to work LONGER hours, so they can earn more money faster. Many of them are women separated from their children back on the farm, trying to earn as much money as they can, as quickly as they can, so they can go back home to their families. Stop trying to project your values onto people you don't understand, who have very different priorities.
under the worst possible working conditions
Chinese factories are nowhere "the worst". They are far better than the farm jobs these people left behind.
and living in a barracks next to the factory.
The dormitories are provided as a convenience for migrant workers. No one is required to live in them, and many do not.
That qualifies as slave labor very nicely.
Hogwash.
Why does Apple get a pass when everyone raked BlackBerry over the coals
Because "everyone" didn't criticize BB, and it unlikely that the people defending Apple are the same people that criticized BB.
Just because all the companies do it doesn't mean it's good.
It also doesn't mean it is bad. Over the last 30 years, factory jobs in China have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. Anyone who thinks that is "bad", has never done 16 hours of stoop labor in a mosquito infested rice paddy. Because, for most of these people, that is the alternative.
It is absurd to call it "slave labor" just because a flabby white American wouldn't want the job.
Corporations are bound to obey the laws of the countries in which they operate. Apples argument against the FBI subpoena is not that it is wrong, but that it is illegal. In China, they cannot make that argument. China is an authoritarian country, and that is not something that is going to be changed by Apple, or any other American corporation. It is not their role to "fix" China. The Chinese people need to do that for themselves.
Most places don't ask such questions
Most places are not religious institutions.
I'd love to see those idiots if people were allowed to refuse them service because of their religion.
This is already true. A church is free to refuse service to muslims. A mosque is free to refuse service to christians.
It's a former employer (I think I mentioned that in the question).
That doesn't matter. An email is good enough. If it goes through a "standard" email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, whatever) then it is a lot harder to forge and back-date an email than a formal written letter, and it will thus carry greater weight in court.
You: Can I release blah blah?
Them: Sure, go ahead.
That is ALL you need.