The problem is that Rightscorp had "NO" proof. Period.
Aha! So the key question then is: proof of what? What were they seeking to prove?
Suppose the case was BMG versus John Doe, where BMG+Rightscorp were trying to prove that John Doe committed copyright infringement. Then Rightscorp would have had to prove that the IP address was in use by that John Doe, and that the modem wasn't hacked, and that it wasn't someone else using their Wifi, etc.
But that isn't what this case was. It was BMG versus Cox, where BMG+Rightscorp were trying to prove that Cox was willfully negligent in their handling of DMCA complaints. So all of this stuff about IP address, hacked computers and modems, etc - doesn't matter. For the purpose of this case, the complaint was lodged against a BMG IP address, and Cox had to respond. It doesn't even matter if actual copyright infringement happened.
The preliminary ruling actually spends 5 - 10 pages talking about this issue. It came down to this: Even if most of the DMCA complaints from Rightscorp were 100% wrong, it doesn't matter. All it takes is 1 case where they were right for BMG to show that Cox's negligence was harmful to BMG.
Great points. The ruling does go into how Cox both knew about the infringement and could have stopped it, prior to talking about material contribution. This reduces my fears somewhat.
So every article I find on this is garbage. I'm reading the ruling on summary judgement from Dec 1st.
Here's my conclusion from reading the ruling: 1) Cox had an official policy to not actually terminate repeat offenders because they didn't want to lose customers. - This means they weren't in compliance with the DMCA. I gotta agree with the court on that one. - Side note: If someone is pirating that much, and Cox was still profiting, then why do they need to institute bandwidth caps? 2) The Supreme Court Grokster decision was the scariest blow here. - The court says Grokster didn't limit liability to companies actually inducing or profiting from copyright violations. - That completely changes my understanding of Grokster! - The court says Cox is contributarily liable because they materially contributed to the copyright infringement.
That "materially contributed" thing is frightening. This is what we've all been afraid of because it seems to open-up the possibility that the maker of the modem is liable, and the company who installed the wires is liable, or the maker of the downloading software, etc. Lots of people materially contributed. We need to really limit this definition of "material contribution."
Here's my notes: Cox limits DMCA complaint emails to 200/day from any given copyright holder. Cox doesn't do anything with the notices until they receive 8 of them for a single user within 6 months. Termination happens at like 15+ within 6 months. "Termination" just means the user has to call Cox and apologize, and the counter is reset. Rightscorp auto-generates DMCA emails. Rightscorp was sending emails with settlement notices in them. Cox says those notices aren't within the spirit of the DMCA, so they auto-delete them. Rightscorp responded by sending 24,000/day Cox just outright blocked Rightscorp's emails. The judge cited the Grokster case as the reason that ISPs can be liable for user's copyright actions. They basically rehashed the whole Grokster case, the whole "making available" theory, and all that jazz. The DMCA says ISPs must implement a "reasonable" repeat infringer policy. The law left this *completely* open. The only way anyone figures out what it means is when they get sued for not doing a "reasonable" job. The courts then clarify the law a bit more each time. Ugh! The courts say that ISPs are not required to actively monitor for infringement. Rightscorp made various complaints about Cox's policy. The court decided that Cox's account termination was too lenient. The court didn't even really care that Cox blocked Rightscorp's emails. Cox didn't have a repeat infringer policy before 2012. And Cox derided the intentionally circumvented the process anyway. Cox higher-ups sent an email that basically told the abuse department not to terminate anyway, because they can't afford to lose customers. Cox complained that BMG didn't hold copyright to lots of this stuff. Court says: Yes they did, and it doesn't matter anyway. Cox says: this whole DMCA complaint process is a farce. Judge says: Yeah, but you knew some were real and still ignored those. The court disregards Cox's arguments that Rightscorp are extortionists as irrelevant since they weren't extorting Cox. Sounds like the end-users might have had an argument there, but Cox doesn't.
I'm unsure what you mean by compiler bug. I think we are all saying the same thing, but the words "reliable" and "precise" are not being used correctly.
Let us be clear on terms:
reliable: consistently good in quality or performance; able to be trusted.
precise: marked by exactness and accuracy of expression or detail.
flexible: ready and able to change so as to adapt to different circumstances.
If statements are reliable and precise. AI is flexible. This is a trade-off.
For example: if (distance 500 millimeters) then...
That if statement is reliable: It will always branch if the distance is less than 500 millimeters. There is no way it will not do that. That if statement is precise: If the distance is 499 millimeters, it will not take the branch. At 500, it will take the branch. That if statement is not flexible: It does not capture that, in some cases, 500 millimeters is not the best value.
Another example: As I get closer to the other car, turn away from it. Approaching 500 millimeters, get really worried that you are dangerously close and take more aggressive action to get away.
That paragraph is flexible: It involves gray areas where multiple factors can weigh into the response. That paragraph is not precise: It does not explicitly state at what distance a specific action should be taken. That paragraph is not reliable: It is difficult to prove that it will do the same thing in all cases, and it is not easy to predict what set of inputs will yield what actions.
This is a problem game developers have to deal with all the time. If you use AI techniques, then the game characters may act unexpectedly. Sometimes that is good, sometimes it is bad! Take a race car game: The programmer may use AI to develop the path that a race car follows on the track. But then they may save that into a fixed array of way points so that the AI behaves precisely and reliably for all players on all systems. Boring yes, easy to test though.
And there's no lack of competitiveness, with the Big 4 mobile providers pulling out
There is a serious lack of competitiveness.
I live 20 minutes outside of a one of the biggest metropolitan areas in America. 2 of those 4 provide service to my home. 1 of those 4 provides service to my home and office. And there would only be 2 providers if the FTC hadn't interfered with recent acquisitions.
There's no shortage of anti-competitive behavior from these "big 4" companies. We have the courts, regulatory bodies, and librarian of congress to thank for the ability to unlock our phones, get out of our contracts fairly, transfer our phone numbers, use our phones on other providers, and buy phones from someone other than those big 4 companies. It's been nothing but a battle against anti-competitive behavior for decades. Do not mistake this situation as offering competition.
“‘If’ statements kill.” They’re unreliable and imprecise in a real world full of vagaries and nuance. It’s better to teach the computer to be like a human, who constantly processes all kinds of visual clues and uses experience,
I think he meant to say that "They're reliable and precise in a real world full of vagaries and nuance." The statement is insightful - if statements are perfectly accurate and do exactly what they were coded to do, no more no less. Normally, this is what makes computers really powerful and reliable. But when dealing with humans, it is what limits them. It's an analog world out here.
I can only speak for the United States, but here, the constitution explicitly forbids "ex post facto" laws that make something a crime retroactively. Can you cite an example where this has happened? Perhaps this precaution is to protect banks from such activity in other countries?
CONSTITUTION OF MARYLAND ARTICLE XVI THE REFERENDUM....No law making any appropriation for maintaining the State Government, or for maintaining or aiding any public institution, not exceeding the next previous appropriation for the same purpose, shall be subject to rejection or repeal under this Section.
Public Act 436, that, as an appropriation, is referendum proof.
Whoops! Looks like they need to amend their state constitution. Or take this to the Michigan Supreme Court. Their constitution says:
The people reserve to themselves the power to propose laws and to enact and reject laws, called the initiative, and the power to approve or reject laws enacted by the legislature, called the referendum. The power of initiative extends only to laws which the legislature may enact under this constitution. The power of referendum does not extend to acts making appropriations for state institutions or to meet deficiencies in state funds
I doubt that the writers of the Michigan state constitution meant that legislators could add "...and the state will buy a candy cane" to their laws and have them be referendum-proof. It seems more likely that an appropriations bill was meant to have nothing but appropriations in them. Combining appropriations with other laws blurs the definition of an appropriations bill. I bet there is a good chance the Michigan Supreme Court would either strike down the law, or allow a referendum to proceed against the portions of the bill that are not appropriations.
Why would you name a product "code" when that term already has meaning? Name it "Own Office" or "Collabora Online" or even "Snicker Pig." Those are all terms that do not already have meaning. I can't ask a someone "Do you use code?"
Thunderbird for example has 'Archive' as an option, but if I migrate to a different client I assume that won't work anymore.
Nope!:-)
I have about 10 years of email in Thunderbird. It keeps data in the mbox format which is a well supported open standard. The files are human readable and can be greped. There's lots of 3rd-party tools that support mbox. Thunderbird builds indexes (maybe those are proprietary) which are good enough that I can search that decade of email in a few seconds. (Maybe that is only searching by subject, to, and from. Message body searches might take longer). I remove attachments from old mail though, because that eats up space and is not valuable. If I needed the attachment, I saved it somewhere more appropriate.
The Thunderbird archive feature merely moves the mail into separate mbox folders to keep the main file from getting too big. It doesn't make them proprietary.
The hard part might be moving existing mail into that format from whatever it is in now.
I meant the "old" built-in apps. Ex: Under Windows 8, you can still run the "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" if you want the full functionality. You can still run the "old" IE11 app. They removed those in Windows 10. Sorry for not being clear.
Without zoning laws, your could have neighbor could sell their land and build a coal plant. Brothels could be built next to schools. Without permits, someone could build a well that sucks up the water from all their neighbors' wells. Building decisions affect the local community.
Edge is crippled in the same way that the other Windows 10 applications are. Unless you are on a tablet or a phone, just use Chrome or Firefox.
Windows 8 applications were totally crippled, down to phone/tablet functionality. But at least you had the "old" desktop apps to fall back to.
Windows 10 applications are better, but still not as good as regular desktop apps. Only now you don't have the "old" desktop apps to fall back to.
It is kinda like going back to the old days of Windows, when Microsoft didn't really include anything, and step 1 to make a system usable was to install a bunch of standard 3rd-party apps.
Maybe Microsoft will one day spin-off the Windows division, so it becomes just another operating system that their cloud service supports. If they start writing their services to use.NET, then they could use Roslyn and.NET Core to make all their services portable. One could run IIS or Exchange on Linux. If it meant more sales for Azure, they could profit from it.
Both Trump and Clinton said the same thing. Why only attack one of them in the summary when the article criticizes both parties? This goes to show that both sides have no concern for the constitution, and are probably just pandering to fears.
The article says:
Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton urged tech companies to “deny online space” to terrorists. Clinton then anticipated and waved away presumed First Amendment criticisms. We’re going to hear all the usual complaints,” she said on Monday, “you know, freedom of speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war...
Wow, she basically summarized the first amendment as "blah blah blah" and justified that it is okay to violate the constitution during wartime. This is the exact same kind of logic that was used 200 years ago that made us write those constitutional amendments. We have been fighting the same political battles for 200 years.
Didn't they change the program to open it up to boys at some point? While it doesn't say "girls only," every other sentence in Google's announcement page says something that amounts to "this is a program for girls."
Earlier this year, we introduced a program called Made with Code to inspire millions of girls to try coding...
...girls can use the introductory programming language...
Still, even as coding becomes more important, less than 1% of high school girls say...
Over the past three years, SSD prices have dropped between 31 cents per gig annually and 13 cents per gig annually.
They mean that the amount of the drop varies. The maximum drop seen was 31 cents, and the minimum drop seen was 13 cents. I had to read the summary 3 times to figure out what they meant.
1. Copy legislator's license plates. 2. Place phony plates on cars near streets known to have a prostitution problem. 3. Hilarity ensues as Los Angeles legislators get prostitution warning letters.
Slashdot Mirror
There was no takedown notice filed against Cox. That's not the issue.
I thought these aircraft weren't allowed to run in public airspace. I am pretty sure that 50' above my backyard definitely isn't public airspace.
The problem is that Rightscorp had "NO" proof. Period.
Aha! So the key question then is: proof of what? What were they seeking to prove?
Suppose the case was BMG versus John Doe, where BMG+Rightscorp were trying to prove that John Doe committed copyright infringement. Then Rightscorp would have had to prove that the IP address was in use by that John Doe, and that the modem wasn't hacked, and that it wasn't someone else using their Wifi, etc.
But that isn't what this case was. It was BMG versus Cox, where BMG+Rightscorp were trying to prove that Cox was willfully negligent in their handling of DMCA complaints. So all of this stuff about IP address, hacked computers and modems, etc - doesn't matter. For the purpose of this case, the complaint was lodged against a BMG IP address, and Cox had to respond. It doesn't even matter if actual copyright infringement happened.
The preliminary ruling actually spends 5 - 10 pages talking about this issue. It came down to this: Even if most of the DMCA complaints from Rightscorp were 100% wrong, it doesn't matter. All it takes is 1 case where they were right for BMG to show that Cox's negligence was harmful to BMG.
Great points. The ruling does go into how Cox both knew about the infringement and could have stopped it, prior to talking about material contribution. This reduces my fears somewhat.
So every article I find on this is garbage. I'm reading the ruling on summary judgement from Dec 1st.
Here's my conclusion from reading the ruling:
1) Cox had an official policy to not actually terminate repeat offenders because they didn't want to lose customers.
- This means they weren't in compliance with the DMCA. I gotta agree with the court on that one.
- Side note: If someone is pirating that much, and Cox was still profiting, then why do they need to institute bandwidth caps?
2) The Supreme Court Grokster decision was the scariest blow here.
- The court says Grokster didn't limit liability to companies actually inducing or profiting from copyright violations.
- That completely changes my understanding of Grokster!
- The court says Cox is contributarily liable because they materially contributed to the copyright infringement.
That "materially contributed" thing is frightening. This is what we've all been afraid of because it seems to open-up the possibility that the maker of the modem is liable, and the company who installed the wires is liable, or the maker of the downloading software, etc. Lots of people materially contributed. We need to really limit this definition of "material contribution."
Here's my notes:
Cox limits DMCA complaint emails to 200/day from any given copyright holder.
Cox doesn't do anything with the notices until they receive 8 of them for a single user within 6 months. Termination happens at like 15+ within 6 months.
"Termination" just means the user has to call Cox and apologize, and the counter is reset.
Rightscorp auto-generates DMCA emails.
Rightscorp was sending emails with settlement notices in them.
Cox says those notices aren't within the spirit of the DMCA, so they auto-delete them.
Rightscorp responded by sending 24,000/day
Cox just outright blocked Rightscorp's emails.
The judge cited the Grokster case as the reason that ISPs can be liable for user's copyright actions. They basically rehashed the whole Grokster case, the whole "making available" theory, and all that jazz.
The DMCA says ISPs must implement a "reasonable" repeat infringer policy. The law left this *completely* open. The only way anyone figures out what it means is when they get sued for not doing a "reasonable" job. The courts then clarify the law a bit more each time. Ugh!
The courts say that ISPs are not required to actively monitor for infringement.
Rightscorp made various complaints about Cox's policy.
The court decided that Cox's account termination was too lenient.
The court didn't even really care that Cox blocked Rightscorp's emails.
Cox didn't have a repeat infringer policy before 2012. And Cox derided the intentionally circumvented the process anyway.
Cox higher-ups sent an email that basically told the abuse department not to terminate anyway, because they can't afford to lose customers.
Cox complained that BMG didn't hold copyright to lots of this stuff. Court says: Yes they did, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Cox says: this whole DMCA complaint process is a farce. Judge says: Yeah, but you knew some were real and still ignored those.
The court disregards Cox's arguments that Rightscorp are extortionists as irrelevant since they weren't extorting Cox. Sounds like the end-users might have had an argument there, but Cox doesn't.
I'm unsure what you mean by compiler bug. I think we are all saying the same thing, but the words "reliable" and "precise" are not being used correctly.
Let us be clear on terms:
reliable: consistently good in quality or performance; able to be trusted.
precise: marked by exactness and accuracy of expression or detail.
flexible: ready and able to change so as to adapt to different circumstances.
If statements are reliable and precise. AI is flexible. This is a trade-off.
For example: ...
if (distance 500 millimeters) then
That if statement is reliable: It will always branch if the distance is less than 500 millimeters. There is no way it will not do that.
That if statement is precise: If the distance is 499 millimeters, it will not take the branch. At 500, it will take the branch.
That if statement is not flexible: It does not capture that, in some cases, 500 millimeters is not the best value.
Another example:
As I get closer to the other car, turn away from it. Approaching 500 millimeters, get really worried that you are dangerously close and take more aggressive action to get away.
That paragraph is flexible: It involves gray areas where multiple factors can weigh into the response.
That paragraph is not precise: It does not explicitly state at what distance a specific action should be taken.
That paragraph is not reliable: It is difficult to prove that it will do the same thing in all cases, and it is not easy to predict what set of inputs will yield what actions.
This is a problem game developers have to deal with all the time. If you use AI techniques, then the game characters may act unexpectedly. Sometimes that is good, sometimes it is bad! Take a race car game: The programmer may use AI to develop the path that a race car follows on the track. But then they may save that into a fixed array of way points so that the AI behaves precisely and reliably for all players on all systems. Boring yes, easy to test though.
And there's no lack of competitiveness, with the Big 4 mobile providers pulling out
There is a serious lack of competitiveness.
I live 20 minutes outside of a one of the biggest metropolitan areas in America. 2 of those 4 provide service to my home. 1 of those 4 provides service to my home and office. And there would only be 2 providers if the FTC hadn't interfered with recent acquisitions.
There's no shortage of anti-competitive behavior from these "big 4" companies. We have the courts, regulatory bodies, and librarian of congress to thank for the ability to unlock our phones, get out of our contracts fairly, transfer our phone numbers, use our phones on other providers, and buy phones from someone other than those big 4 companies. It's been nothing but a battle against anti-competitive behavior for decades. Do not mistake this situation as offering competition.
“‘If’ statements kill.” They’re unreliable and imprecise in a real world full of vagaries and nuance. It’s better to teach the computer to be like a human, who constantly processes all kinds of visual clues and uses experience,
I think he meant to say that "They're reliable and precise in a real world full of vagaries and nuance." The statement is insightful - if statements are perfectly accurate and do exactly what they were coded to do, no more no less. Normally, this is what makes computers really powerful and reliable. But when dealing with humans, it is what limits them. It's an analog world out here.
I can only speak for the United States, but here, the constitution explicitly forbids "ex post facto" laws that make something a crime retroactively. Can you cite an example where this has happened? Perhaps this precaution is to protect banks from such activity in other countries?
Gah!!!! Other state constitutions say the same thing. CRUD!
CONSTITUTION OF MARYLAND ...No law making any appropriation for maintaining the State Government, or for maintaining or aiding any public institution, not exceeding the next previous appropriation for the same purpose, shall be subject to rejection or repeal under this Section.
ARTICLE XVI
THE REFERENDUM.
I posted so I lost my mod points. Darnity, this was a really good post.
Public Act 436, that, as an appropriation, is referendum proof.
Whoops! Looks like they need to amend their state constitution. Or take this to the Michigan Supreme Court. Their constitution says:
The people reserve to themselves the power to propose laws and to enact and reject laws, called the initiative, and the power to approve or reject laws enacted by the legislature, called the referendum. The power of initiative extends only to laws which the legislature may enact under this constitution. The power of referendum does not extend to acts making appropriations for state institutions or to meet deficiencies in state funds
I doubt that the writers of the Michigan state constitution meant that legislators could add "...and the state will buy a candy cane" to their laws and have them be referendum-proof. It seems more likely that an appropriations bill was meant to have nothing but appropriations in them. Combining appropriations with other laws blurs the definition of an appropriations bill. I bet there is a good chance the Michigan Supreme Court would either strike down the law, or allow a referendum to proceed against the portions of the bill that are not appropriations.
This is common practice, but hiding evidence of past crimes is a scary reason to delete old emails.
Why would you name a product "code" when that term already has meaning? Name it "Own Office" or "Collabora Online" or even "Snicker Pig." Those are all terms that do not already have meaning. I can't ask a someone "Do you use code?"
Use the Thunderbird archive.
Thunderbird for example has 'Archive' as an option, but if I migrate to a different client I assume that won't work anymore.
Nope! :-)
I have about 10 years of email in Thunderbird. It keeps data in the mbox format which is a well supported open standard. The files are human readable and can be greped. There's lots of 3rd-party tools that support mbox. Thunderbird builds indexes (maybe those are proprietary) which are good enough that I can search that decade of email in a few seconds. (Maybe that is only searching by subject, to, and from. Message body searches might take longer). I remove attachments from old mail though, because that eats up space and is not valuable. If I needed the attachment, I saved it somewhere more appropriate.
The Thunderbird archive feature merely moves the mail into separate mbox folders to keep the main file from getting too big. It doesn't make them proprietary.
The hard part might be moving existing mail into that format from whatever it is in now.
I meant the "old" built-in apps. Ex: Under Windows 8, you can still run the "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" if you want the full functionality. You can still run the "old" IE11 app. They removed those in Windows 10. Sorry for not being clear.
Without zoning laws, your could have neighbor could sell their land and build a coal plant. Brothels could be built next to schools. Without permits, someone could build a well that sucks up the water from all their neighbors' wells. Building decisions affect the local community.
Edge is crippled in the same way that the other Windows 10 applications are. Unless you are on a tablet or a phone, just use Chrome or Firefox.
It is kinda like going back to the old days of Windows, when Microsoft didn't really include anything, and step 1 to make a system usable was to install a bunch of standard 3rd-party apps.
Maybe Microsoft will one day spin-off the Windows division, so it becomes just another operating system that their cloud service supports. If they start writing their services to use .NET, then they could use Roslyn and .NET Core to make all their services portable. One could run IIS or Exchange on Linux. If it meant more sales for Azure, they could profit from it.
Both Trump and Clinton said the same thing. Why only attack one of them in the summary when the article criticizes both parties? This goes to show that both sides have no concern for the constitution, and are probably just pandering to fears.
The article says:
Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton urged tech companies to “deny online space” to terrorists. Clinton then anticipated and waved away presumed First Amendment criticisms. We’re going to hear all the usual complaints,” she said on Monday, “you know, freedom of speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war...
Wow, she basically summarized the first amendment as "blah blah blah" and justified that it is okay to violate the constitution during wartime. This is the exact same kind of logic that was used 200 years ago that made us write those constitutional amendments. We have been fighting the same political battles for 200 years.
Every year 384,032 persons are injured and 4,789 persons killed through wet roads,
Yet another reason to ban dihydrogen monoxide!
Didn't they change the program to open it up to boys at some point? While it doesn't say "girls only," every other sentence in Google's announcement page says something that amounts to "this is a program for girls."
Earlier this year, we introduced a program called Made with Code to inspire millions of girls to try coding...
...girls can use the introductory programming language...
Still, even as coding becomes more important, less than 1% of high school girls say...
Aha!
http://developers.slashdot.org...
They meant to say:
Over the past three years, SSD prices have dropped between 31 cents per gig annually and 13 cents per gig annually.
They mean that the amount of the drop varies. The maximum drop seen was 31 cents, and the minimum drop seen was 13 cents. I had to read the summary 3 times to figure out what they meant.
1. Copy legislator's license plates.
2. Place phony plates on cars near streets known to have a prostitution problem.
3. Hilarity ensues as Los Angeles legislators get prostitution warning letters.
Corporations pay taxes too. In theory.