The law can say anything is anything. That doesn't mean it is. But in this case, it doesn't even say what you think it says. Dowling v. United States, in which a prosecution was attempted for "trafficking stolen property" because a person was in possession of bootleg records, established that copyright violation is not equivalent to theft, as far as the law is concerned.
That aside, the rest of your examples are not problematic because of copying, but because of fraud. If I build a car myself and offer to sell it to you telling you I built it myself, that's fine. If I claim that Toyota or Ford built it, that's fraud. Same with your Gibson/Les Paul example—the sellers in your example are representing that the guitars are something that they're not. If Xingxao Factory makes a Les Paul knockoff and sells them as a Xingxao Special, there's no trouble at all. If they claim Les Paul/Gibson made it and that's not true, they're defrauding the buyer.
The same is true of identity theft. If someone knows my name, there's no problem. If someone tries to claim they're me, they're committing fraud. I know of no cases where someone putting something up on a torrent site or what have you claims they wrote/made it, so your example is inapplicable.
As to YouTube, they fully comply with the DMCA's safe harbor and takedown provisions, which is the relevant law. I'm not sure how you think they're "illegal" given that, since they actually fully comply with the applicable law. The DMCA, in one of the few things it did right, released service providers from liability provided they do exactly that. It would be a poor choice indeed to say "Well, the law says you get immunity if you do foo, bar, and baz, and you did foo, bar, and baz, but we're going to hold you liable anyway."
Given that. I'm not sure on what grounds you base your "illegal business" argument, nor on the grounds that such protection would not be available to you or I. Any site admin can put up the required OCILLA notice, comply with notices received as required, and take advantage of the immunity provisions, and quite a few do. YouTube isn't getting some kind of special treatment here.
But the bigger issue I see is that of a law that's ultimately unenforceable, given new technology. A few people might get hit with lawsuits, but the odds are so astronomically low that everyone else doesn't really care, and the activity just gets driven underground and behind heavier encryption/anonymization. That tends to show that both the law and the business model it protects are unworkable, and both need to be changed or scrapped. That's a problem, and saying "People should just refrain from doing this" or "This should be illegal" obviously hasn't worked—as you know well yourself. We need an approach that acknowledges and integrates current technology, current reality, and the clear will of a very large number of people, not one that attempts to ignore all of those.
For your final bit, you say buying a DVD and copying it is stealing. Stealing from whom, exactly? Stealing requires that I unlawfully deprive someone of something they had, not that they theoretically might have had. If deprivation of profits one might otherwise have had is theft, me riding my bicycle instead of driving my car "steals" from the oil and gas companies every day. Such an assertion is ludicrous. Finding a better way to do something is not theft, even if it means someone else doesn't profit where they otherwise would have.
Sorry, but you cannot steal something by making a copy of it.
A friend of mine has the technical skill to, and is in the process of, building a replica rally car. And I mean an honest, drivable, street and race legal version of the rally car the manufacturer made.
Are you trying to tell me, that while he machines the parts and finds all the data he can on how to exactly replicate the paint job, etc., that he's actually "stealing" the car?
Of course not. Stealing something means to take it away from someone else in a manner that deprives them of it, not to make a replica for yourself. That's true even if making a replica is far less effort than machining the parts for a rally car, and even if thousands or millions can do it almost effortlessly. That just means there's little to no value in a copy. Long-term, the money in such things probably does not lie in "per-copy" sales, and if you do go with that model, you'd probably better accept that for every user that pays, a lot will not, and really don't have to.
Business models should always change to fit reality, not the other way around. If that means there's no longer any business model in something, so be it. It used to be very profitable to go up into the mountains, bring back a huge chunk of ice, and sell it to people who wanted to refrigerate. Now with electric refrigerators, that business model is dead. I'd say we were much better off to let it die than outlaw a newer and more efficient means of refrigeration, and we're better off to let the "per copy" model die than kill off a tremendously useful technology that happens to be tremendously good at copying things.
C'est la vie, technology giveth and technology taketh away. If it turns out that the Internet has moved "creative business" from a "buy ice repeatedly" model to a "buy a fridge once, make all the ice you like" model, then that's how it is.
Send them a written demand for proof that you signed the contract, or for a recording of your verbal agreement to it, being clear that to your knowledge you agreed to no such thing. If they can't provide that, they can't enforce it.
I used to work for a place that did term contracts, and our rule on it was quite clear: If we could not produce a copy of the physical contract with the customer's signature when they asked (after a few days to get it of course, we usually had to contact a local office somewhere to have them fax over), we immediately took the term commitment off. You can wind up in some very big trouble that way otherwise. I'd also let your local District Attorney know if they can't produce proof and give you any pushback about removing it.
Being able to be frank with, and set realistic expectations for, those you work with and for is crucial.
If your boss wants you to do something on an impossible timeline, tell them you can't. If you've got too much on your plate already, give your boss a list of your current projects, and ask him which one should be de-prioritized to push in the latest "emergency". He may suddenly find it's not so urgent after all, and if it's so important something else does need to be pushed back, it now wasn't your idea.
If you go on vacation, make it clear that you may not be immediately (or at all) able to respond to phone calls or email due to where you're going. Again, put it on your boss—ask who he'd like you to cross train in emergency procedures for your area while you're away, and make sure he knows who your vendor contacts are for troubleshooting. Granted, this should be done well before you go on vacation anyway, but all too often it's not.
If your boss is the type to, at this point, stick his fingers in his ears and yell "LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU", it's time to either have a talk with your boss's boss, or polish up your resume. They're not all like this. Most bosses I've worked for are quite reasonable when you're willing to communicate with and listen to them.
What it looks like happened here is that IBM took the basic idea of the heap checker (which, for its time, actually was groundbreaking), and added a module allowing configurable settings. I'm not saying they used the original and flipped a switch. I'm saying the stuff they added is nowhere near innovative or non-obvious enough to even be considered for patentability.
Most programs anymore have settings that can be tweaked without recompiling the program. For IBM to claim that their addition of configurable settings to one more program is a groundbreaking, novel, non-obvious advance is quite wrong. It's standard practice.
I'm not disputing that IBM added to the code, if what's stated there is true (and I've no reason to believe it's not). I'm disputing that their additions reach anywhere near the threshold of patentability, even if one did agree with software patents in concept. It's like GM updating one of their car models to add a navigation system, and then trying to patent that. That's an obvious and widely done thing now, it's not innovative.
That aside, there's about a metric ton of prior art on updating older programs or OS components to improve their runtime configurability. The Linux kernel, for example, has been updated so that many changes that once required a recompile can now be done while running. There's nothing new and novel here.
The ability to configure a program's settings without recompiling it is not some earth shattering idea. Patents shouldn't be for obvious, incremental improvements that are getting done to most or all things in the field already.
I'm all for changing the "at will" bit, or at least imposing some very heavy tax penalties on companies that routinely engage in layoffs. I'm as sick as anyone of seeing people treated as some kind of disposable widget.
But even absent that, it's a different scenario indeed when they basically knew they had no project, and just hired this guy to give the illusion that they did. The fact that the project was in a far different state than they represented it to him pretty well shows they were not acting in good faith. They represented to him that he was going to be taking on a project that was basically ready, when in reality he was there to slightly improve the odds on a longshot bet and get dumped by the wayside if it didn't work out.
That's fraud, and it should be penalized. Don't get me wrong, I think it's equally despicable, and should be equally punishable, to represent a job as a good long-term prospect and then proceed to lay someone off after a couple months. But at least one time, the people doing it got caught, and got stung. Maybe the next company about to pull this trick will have a second thought. Seagate sure will. While this by no means will bring them to bankruptcy, it's a sum that'll get their attention.
That's the point of punitive damages. Actual damages would just be a "cost of doing business", punitive makes it sting at least a little. And if this guy's starting his own company, he'll probably be employing some people himself soon, if he hasn't already. I can hardly begrudge him the money knowing that.
Apparently, English civil courts require real evidence when you bring a case before them.
It's kind of a neat idea. Here, it's "Well, we have an IP address that we think the defendant used around that time!" We should adopt that standard here in the good old US. Actual, hard evidence. What a great idea!
Libertarianism, while different in almost every other way from communism, is exactly the same in one very important respect. It looks great on paper, but it doesn't work in practice.
The Gilded Age is not a time at which I would ever want to have lived. That "libertarian utopia" wasn't much of one at all. There was massive unemployment, widespread poverty even among those who did have jobs, and little to no protection for workers. Workers were required to work in horrible, unsafe conditions for "wages" on which they could barely feed themselves. And don't tell me they had the option of moving elsewhere-with no regulations, everywhere was like that.
The best and most successful societies are a hybrid of capitalism and socialism. They do allow private ownership, but regulate how far one may go. They protect workers. They recognize that "consumers" and "economic activity" are not the only legitimate goal of a society, and try to achieve a balance between economy, quality of life, and respect for fundamental human rights.
In our system, we've got a long way to go. I would much rather see retraining than just long-term public assistance. I would like to see companies that don't pay a living wage taxed at a rate that reflects the true societal costs of failing to do so. I would like to see "externalities" put back into "internalities" paid for by the parties who actually caused them, instead of being handled by the community while a corporation pockets the profits made by causing the problem.
But what I don't want to see is another Gilded Age. Your glib assertion that those with no money and no job can somehow seek sufficient training to work in a different field or pack up and move to a different location is well out of touch with reality. It takes a significant investment to get into any field which pays reasonably well, and to suggest that private charity might or might not help with retraining if work in that field suddenly dries up is ludicrous, or deliberately accepts that a lot of people will be left out in the cold to die.
Maybe that's the type of society you want to live in. You can have it. I want no part of it.
The only thing I see fixing this constant "We'll offshore! We'll offshore!" is the creation of a setup whereby you pay taxes on each dollar (euro, yen, pound, yuan, what have you) in the country where it is made, regardless of where it ultimately goes. Ensure that these massive corporations cannot cynically refuse to contribute to the upkeep of the communities who pay their massive executive bonuses.
But in the meantime, ignore it. If the leeches want to leave, let them. It may cause some short-term pain, but it'll also cause a return to more localized economies where money doesn't all take a one-way ticket out of your country.
Obviously, given the state Ireland is in, accommodating these massive corporations by quaking in fear they'll leave is not good for you in the long term. I could've told them that some time ago, but some people seem to think that "business is good" and that's all there is to it. These tend to be the people making the obscene profits, of course, or those who wish they could. Let them go.
You can find a good few of the studies that have been done catalogued here. The tl;dr version is that Wal-Mart does not pay well or offer benefits, so its workers generally require public assistance to make up the shortfall. Very little of the money it makes stays local (most of it, of course, is being shipped right off to China), and it's often structured or "incentivized" by the city to pay very little tax. This results in a group of people who are long-term dependent on public assistance (both those who work at Wal-Mart and those who do not, since Wal-Marts tend to drastically reduce the number of decent jobs in an area), so it's a massive drain but only a small boost to the local economy.
I recall a story some time ago of how Wal-Marts actually had materials in some of their break rooms of how to apply for food stamps and the like. Admittedly, I can't find the cite for that, but it certainly illustrates the problem. People with a steady, full-time job shouldn't need food and medical aid.
Granted, it's not only Wal-Mart. A lot of these "minimum wage" type places are similar leeches. They're basically taking the money states and cities are putting into food and medical aid and pocketing it, since they're not paying a wage anyone could realistically live on.
I'm not sure how prohibiting bribery is a violation of "free speech". I can't legally bribe a cop, a judge, a building inspector, hell, the dogcatcher. I can't do that in cash, and I can't do it "in kind"-paying for things on their behalf or that benefit them even if I never directly give them the cash.
If it's not a violation of free speech to say you can't directly or indirectly bribe those officials, it's not a violation to say you can't directly or indirectly bribe others. I can still speak on their behalf until I'm blue in the face-I just can't buy them a Super Bowl commercial. Nor can I use my newspaper or TV company to stump for them, any more than a newspaper could give free classifieds for a year to the local fire marshal in exchange for, or hopes of, "forgetting" the fire inspection. That's not free speech. It's bribery.
As to corporations, they're artificial entities, not people. Each individual who works for a corporation retains full speech rights, but the corporation itself should have no such.
Some sort of national initiative/referendum process, perhaps? Many states have it, and while imperfect in its own ways, it does tend to keep in check the worst abuses. Of course, sometimes people pass spectacularly popular but spectacularly stupid laws, too.
But the main thing to that is to get corporate cash the hell out of politics. Amend the Constitution to specify that corporations are not "persons" with the same rights as real people, including the right to participation in the political process. Then stop allowing candidates for office to take brib-erm, excuse me, "campaign contributions". Each viable candidate gets to speak using the same platform in the same manner. One person one vote, not one dollar one vote.
...all that will happen is they will refile in the other districts where the offenders reside.
While whoever marked you troll is probably on the money, a lot of people probably might wonder why this would be significant.
It's hard to geolocate many IP addresses with any degree of precision, especially one you got months ago. And even if you can, it's not like they ever make their money back on these cases-even if they win, most of the defendants are going to go bankrupt. They won't make enough money in their life to pay the exorbitant judgment. Filing these in every district in the country, refiling the ones where you "missed", etc., is going to run up the legal bills very quickly. In the meantime, you're going to continue to annoy judges by clogging up their dockets with cases intended to "make an example" of Little Johnny or Grandma. And while an annoyed judge still must follow the law, they can certainly do as this judge did-choose to follow it very strictly indeed.
Contrary to what some people think (and admittedly, contrary to how some of them act), judges are not gods who can just do whatever the hell they want. If the judge in this case issued an order like that, there would be a stay on it from the next court up faster than you could blink. And since there would be no legal grounds underpinning it, it would then be solidly overturned on appeal while the temporary stay kept it from ever having any effect anyway. Since this subpoena is against a specific person, not HP as a company, there are no grounds for the judge to take action against HP. They can't order your family imprisoned to try and force you to show up for court, either. You can't just take action against people or organizations related to someone because they're related.
Honestly, my first question is, is it Google or the German government ignoring the law here? I'm not entirely familiar with German law, granted, and it does have some oddities, but I'm not certain under what legal theory an "opt out" right could be created. If I took a photo of some friends on a public street in Germany and posted it on a website, with a home in the background, would the homeowner have the right under German law to demand I blur the home or take down the photo? And if they wouldn't, what's the difference here? I know in the US and most countries with similar legal structures, photos taken from a public street of the street-facing part of a building are not presumed to be a violation of the right to privacy, as anyone walking down that street can see it. What's the significant difference here?
If they're not willing to take a stand on this, most of their customers probably don't know the difference. If they do decide to stand up, they give India one of two choices:
Behave like a democratic government instead of a tinpot dictatorship, in which case this quietly goes away. No, they don't get to monitor, but secure methods of communication exist anyway. One more makes no difference.
Force RIM to stop operations over this-and explain to tens of millions of the most powerful and influential people in the country that you took their Blackberries away because RIM wouldn't allow invasion of your privacy.
So yes, in this case, they do serve their customers well by calling what's likely a bluff. India is desperate for development. They're not going to alienate their elite over something like this.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind too much seeing that. It's probably past time we got over the idea that ideas and concepts can be "owned" by someone. And I wouldn't exactly call Thomas Jefferson an extremist, either.
But that aside, copyright law in the case of the GPL is being used as the solution, where in the other scenario it's the problem. Why couldn't patents be used the same way? That's not hypocritical, any more than it's hypocritical to use a gun to defend yourself if someone's trying to kill you with one.
If everyone used software patents with only the stipulation that source couldn't be closed if they were used, they wouldn't be "evil". Unfortunately, they're not used that way.
It's similar to the GPL. Locking down software under draconian EULAs is the problem. Using the copyright system "against itself" is the solution. No different with patents. A Mutually Assured Destruction scenario would sure make a closed source company think twice before pulling out the patent artillery against an open source project.
FOSS often requires that the recipient share alike. There's nothing anti-FOSS in saying "You may use this software, but anything you use it in must have full source code released under the same open source license as this project." That's already commonly done with licenses like the GPL-you can't, for example, use the Linux kernel as the basis for a closed-source kernel. Using patent law in addition to copyright would, if anything, make that more common, and give a "strike back" option against those who attempt to use patent law against FOSS-whoever does so probably will have by then violated an open source patent in their closed source software.
Erm, that's the opposite of what I said. That may work in markets with low barriers to entry and large numbers of genuinely different competitors, but there are fewer and fewer of those. For the most part, barriers to entry are high, and most people have access to one giant quasi-monopoly, or maybe a few giant oligopolies. Regulation absolutely has its place there.
If you want to regulate in such a way that meaningful competition is allowed by lowering the entry barrier, such as mandatory linesharing at reasonable rates, I'm actually alright with that. In some cases, that may even be a better case than direct regulation of what the existing players may and may not do (though even then, there probably have to be some "lines in the sand").
But no, overall, it's not the "land of opportunity" for whoever says to themselves "All the cell companies suck. I'll go do better than all of them." I can't go do that, even if my idea really is superior to anything they're doing, because the barrier to entry in terms of initial cash required is so high. Can you?
How about if I'm a "voting customer", who will happily take my money elsewhere if someone tries to screw me?
And if there are so few choices and they all (in reality or in fact) collude, by making changes in lockstep, that's exactly what regulation is for. So no, it is not only shareholders who have a vote-ultimately, the public can veto anything the shareholders decide, through exactly that mechanism, and that's much more likely to happen if the company makes people unhappy on a regular basis and does not respond to negative feedback by scrapping or changing what it planned to do. The ability of those shareholders to be shareholders with highly limited liability is the result of a corporate charter granted by the government, and thus also the people. If the company starts to abuse that charter by utilizing a large market share to charge more and offer less, the people have every right to modify, limit, or revoke that license to operate with limited liability, and to define boundaries outside of which the company may not step.
It absolutely sickens me to see "No, just shareholders! Shareholders! Screw the customers, the employees, and the public!" Giving customers something they'll want to keep even when their contract is up, keeping employees happy so they will stay long-term, and maintaining a good reputation with the public are all part of the long-term viability of a company. You're ultimately hurting even the shareholders when you piss them all off for a short-term quarterly boost.
And it'll work, because child porn really is one of those things that pretty much everyone can agree is a bad thing that we'd like to not exist anymore, and it's easy to rally people for it.
No thought crime in my society, thank you, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. I am one of the few who will say so, because of the hysteria surrounding the issue. But please do not presume to speak for "pretty much everyone", because you don't.
Would I like it not to exist? Sure, given the choice, I'd prefer it didn't. But do I support outlawing it? Absolutely not. Abusing children should absolutely be against the law, but having an image being a crime? Not a crime. If having a copy of Lolita is not a crime, having a copy of such images should not be. And I'd far rather see neither be a crime, than both.
Ultimately, I would like to see it not be illegal to possess any writing, image, video, or concept of any type. The making of some, of course, might be illegal, but simple possession would not. The only way we'll eliminate this crap is if we eliminate the idea that simple possession of information can be inherently bad.
Because the right to speak freely is a fundamental right, and you cannot always (in law or in fact) always speak freely if you cannot sometimes speak anonymously.
It is, of course, on the reader to judge the reliability of anonymous or pseudonymous information. But that certainly does not mean that anonymous or pseudonymous speech should be prohibited altogether. What if it's not even the government prohibiting your speech? What if your employer, family, what have you, would not like what you're saying or doing on the Net? Should you then just be prohibited, in essence, from being able to publicly speak that way?
In the United States, a lot of the early anti-England tracts and pamphlets were published anonymously or under a pseudonym. I would say for a pretty good reason. We don't need "Papers please!" in real life, and we sure in the hell don't need it online.
Slashdot Mirror
The law can say anything is anything. That doesn't mean it is. But in this case, it doesn't even say what you think it says. Dowling v. United States, in which a prosecution was attempted for "trafficking stolen property" because a person was in possession of bootleg records, established that copyright violation is not equivalent to theft, as far as the law is concerned.
That aside, the rest of your examples are not problematic because of copying, but because of fraud. If I build a car myself and offer to sell it to you telling you I built it myself, that's fine. If I claim that Toyota or Ford built it, that's fraud. Same with your Gibson/Les Paul example—the sellers in your example are representing that the guitars are something that they're not. If Xingxao Factory makes a Les Paul knockoff and sells them as a Xingxao Special, there's no trouble at all. If they claim Les Paul/Gibson made it and that's not true, they're defrauding the buyer.
The same is true of identity theft. If someone knows my name, there's no problem. If someone tries to claim they're me, they're committing fraud. I know of no cases where someone putting something up on a torrent site or what have you claims they wrote/made it, so your example is inapplicable.
As to YouTube, they fully comply with the DMCA's safe harbor and takedown provisions, which is the relevant law. I'm not sure how you think they're "illegal" given that, since they actually fully comply with the applicable law. The DMCA, in one of the few things it did right, released service providers from liability provided they do exactly that. It would be a poor choice indeed to say "Well, the law says you get immunity if you do foo, bar, and baz, and you did foo, bar, and baz, but we're going to hold you liable anyway."
Given that. I'm not sure on what grounds you base your "illegal business" argument, nor on the grounds that such protection would not be available to you or I. Any site admin can put up the required OCILLA notice, comply with notices received as required, and take advantage of the immunity provisions, and quite a few do. YouTube isn't getting some kind of special treatment here.
But the bigger issue I see is that of a law that's ultimately unenforceable, given new technology. A few people might get hit with lawsuits, but the odds are so astronomically low that everyone else doesn't really care, and the activity just gets driven underground and behind heavier encryption/anonymization. That tends to show that both the law and the business model it protects are unworkable, and both need to be changed or scrapped. That's a problem, and saying "People should just refrain from doing this" or "This should be illegal" obviously hasn't worked—as you know well yourself. We need an approach that acknowledges and integrates current technology, current reality, and the clear will of a very large number of people, not one that attempts to ignore all of those.
For your final bit, you say buying a DVD and copying it is stealing. Stealing from whom, exactly? Stealing requires that I unlawfully deprive someone of something they had, not that they theoretically might have had. If deprivation of profits one might otherwise have had is theft, me riding my bicycle instead of driving my car "steals" from the oil and gas companies every day. Such an assertion is ludicrous. Finding a better way to do something is not theft, even if it means someone else doesn't profit where they otherwise would have.
Sorry, but you cannot steal something by making a copy of it.
A friend of mine has the technical skill to, and is in the process of, building a replica rally car. And I mean an honest, drivable, street and race legal version of the rally car the manufacturer made.
Are you trying to tell me, that while he machines the parts and finds all the data he can on how to exactly replicate the paint job, etc., that he's actually "stealing" the car?
Of course not. Stealing something means to take it away from someone else in a manner that deprives them of it, not to make a replica for yourself. That's true even if making a replica is far less effort than machining the parts for a rally car, and even if thousands or millions can do it almost effortlessly. That just means there's little to no value in a copy. Long-term, the money in such things probably does not lie in "per-copy" sales, and if you do go with that model, you'd probably better accept that for every user that pays, a lot will not, and really don't have to.
Business models should always change to fit reality, not the other way around. If that means there's no longer any business model in something, so be it. It used to be very profitable to go up into the mountains, bring back a huge chunk of ice, and sell it to people who wanted to refrigerate. Now with electric refrigerators, that business model is dead. I'd say we were much better off to let it die than outlaw a newer and more efficient means of refrigeration, and we're better off to let the "per copy" model die than kill off a tremendously useful technology that happens to be tremendously good at copying things.
C'est la vie, technology giveth and technology taketh away. If it turns out that the Internet has moved "creative business" from a "buy ice repeatedly" model to a "buy a fridge once, make all the ice you like" model, then that's how it is.
Send them a written demand for proof that you signed the contract, or for a recording of your verbal agreement to it, being clear that to your knowledge you agreed to no such thing. If they can't provide that, they can't enforce it.
I used to work for a place that did term contracts, and our rule on it was quite clear: If we could not produce a copy of the physical contract with the customer's signature when they asked (after a few days to get it of course, we usually had to contact a local office somewhere to have them fax over), we immediately took the term commitment off. You can wind up in some very big trouble that way otherwise. I'd also let your local District Attorney know if they can't produce proof and give you any pushback about removing it.
Being able to be frank with, and set realistic expectations for, those you work with and for is crucial.
If your boss wants you to do something on an impossible timeline, tell them you can't. If you've got too much on your plate already, give your boss a list of your current projects, and ask him which one should be de-prioritized to push in the latest "emergency". He may suddenly find it's not so urgent after all, and if it's so important something else does need to be pushed back, it now wasn't your idea.
If you go on vacation, make it clear that you may not be immediately (or at all) able to respond to phone calls or email due to where you're going. Again, put it on your boss—ask who he'd like you to cross train in emergency procedures for your area while you're away, and make sure he knows who your vendor contacts are for troubleshooting. Granted, this should be done well before you go on vacation anyway, but all too often it's not.
If your boss is the type to, at this point, stick his fingers in his ears and yell "LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU", it's time to either have a talk with your boss's boss, or polish up your resume. They're not all like this. Most bosses I've worked for are quite reasonable when you're willing to communicate with and listen to them.
What it looks like happened here is that IBM took the basic idea of the heap checker (which, for its time, actually was groundbreaking), and added a module allowing configurable settings. I'm not saying they used the original and flipped a switch. I'm saying the stuff they added is nowhere near innovative or non-obvious enough to even be considered for patentability.
Most programs anymore have settings that can be tweaked without recompiling the program. For IBM to claim that their addition of configurable settings to one more program is a groundbreaking, novel, non-obvious advance is quite wrong. It's standard practice.
I'm not disputing that IBM added to the code, if what's stated there is true (and I've no reason to believe it's not). I'm disputing that their additions reach anywhere near the threshold of patentability, even if one did agree with software patents in concept. It's like GM updating one of their car models to add a navigation system, and then trying to patent that. That's an obvious and widely done thing now, it's not innovative.
That aside, there's about a metric ton of prior art on updating older programs or OS components to improve their runtime configurability. The Linux kernel, for example, has been updated so that many changes that once required a recompile can now be done while running. There's nothing new and novel here.
The ability to configure a program's settings without recompiling it is not some earth shattering idea. Patents shouldn't be for obvious, incremental improvements that are getting done to most or all things in the field already.
I sincerely wish you were running in 2012. I'd vote for you over Clown A/Clown B (or should that be "Clown D/Clown R"?) any day.
I'm all for changing the "at will" bit, or at least imposing some very heavy tax penalties on companies that routinely engage in layoffs. I'm as sick as anyone of seeing people treated as some kind of disposable widget.
But even absent that, it's a different scenario indeed when they basically knew they had no project, and just hired this guy to give the illusion that they did. The fact that the project was in a far different state than they represented it to him pretty well shows they were not acting in good faith. They represented to him that he was going to be taking on a project that was basically ready, when in reality he was there to slightly improve the odds on a longshot bet and get dumped by the wayside if it didn't work out.
That's fraud, and it should be penalized. Don't get me wrong, I think it's equally despicable, and should be equally punishable, to represent a job as a good long-term prospect and then proceed to lay someone off after a couple months. But at least one time, the people doing it got caught, and got stung. Maybe the next company about to pull this trick will have a second thought. Seagate sure will. While this by no means will bring them to bankruptcy, it's a sum that'll get their attention.
That's the point of punitive damages. Actual damages would just be a "cost of doing business", punitive makes it sting at least a little. And if this guy's starting his own company, he'll probably be employing some people himself soon, if he hasn't already. I can hardly begrudge him the money knowing that.
Apparently, English civil courts require real evidence when you bring a case before them.
It's kind of a neat idea. Here, it's "Well, we have an IP address that we think the defendant used around that time!" We should adopt that standard here in the good old US. Actual, hard evidence. What a great idea!
Libertarianism, while different in almost every other way from communism, is exactly the same in one very important respect. It looks great on paper, but it doesn't work in practice.
The Gilded Age is not a time at which I would ever want to have lived. That "libertarian utopia" wasn't much of one at all. There was massive unemployment, widespread poverty even among those who did have jobs, and little to no protection for workers. Workers were required to work in horrible, unsafe conditions for "wages" on which they could barely feed themselves. And don't tell me they had the option of moving elsewhere-with no regulations, everywhere was like that.
The best and most successful societies are a hybrid of capitalism and socialism. They do allow private ownership, but regulate how far one may go. They protect workers. They recognize that "consumers" and "economic activity" are not the only legitimate goal of a society, and try to achieve a balance between economy, quality of life, and respect for fundamental human rights.
In our system, we've got a long way to go. I would much rather see retraining than just long-term public assistance. I would like to see companies that don't pay a living wage taxed at a rate that reflects the true societal costs of failing to do so. I would like to see "externalities" put back into "internalities" paid for by the parties who actually caused them, instead of being handled by the community while a corporation pockets the profits made by causing the problem.
But what I don't want to see is another Gilded Age. Your glib assertion that those with no money and no job can somehow seek sufficient training to work in a different field or pack up and move to a different location is well out of touch with reality. It takes a significant investment to get into any field which pays reasonably well, and to suggest that private charity might or might not help with retraining if work in that field suddenly dries up is ludicrous, or deliberately accepts that a lot of people will be left out in the cold to die.
Maybe that's the type of society you want to live in. You can have it. I want no part of it.
The only thing I see fixing this constant "We'll offshore! We'll offshore!" is the creation of a setup whereby you pay taxes on each dollar (euro, yen, pound, yuan, what have you) in the country where it is made, regardless of where it ultimately goes. Ensure that these massive corporations cannot cynically refuse to contribute to the upkeep of the communities who pay their massive executive bonuses.
But in the meantime, ignore it. If the leeches want to leave, let them. It may cause some short-term pain, but it'll also cause a return to more localized economies where money doesn't all take a one-way ticket out of your country.
Obviously, given the state Ireland is in, accommodating these massive corporations by quaking in fear they'll leave is not good for you in the long term. I could've told them that some time ago, but some people seem to think that "business is good" and that's all there is to it. These tend to be the people making the obscene profits, of course, or those who wish they could. Let them go.
You can find a good few of the studies that have been done catalogued here. The tl;dr version is that Wal-Mart does not pay well or offer benefits, so its workers generally require public assistance to make up the shortfall. Very little of the money it makes stays local (most of it, of course, is being shipped right off to China), and it's often structured or "incentivized" by the city to pay very little tax. This results in a group of people who are long-term dependent on public assistance (both those who work at Wal-Mart and those who do not, since Wal-Marts tend to drastically reduce the number of decent jobs in an area), so it's a massive drain but only a small boost to the local economy.
I recall a story some time ago of how Wal-Marts actually had materials in some of their break rooms of how to apply for food stamps and the like. Admittedly, I can't find the cite for that, but it certainly illustrates the problem. People with a steady, full-time job shouldn't need food and medical aid.
Granted, it's not only Wal-Mart. A lot of these "minimum wage" type places are similar leeches. They're basically taking the money states and cities are putting into food and medical aid and pocketing it, since they're not paying a wage anyone could realistically live on.
I'm not sure how prohibiting bribery is a violation of "free speech". I can't legally bribe a cop, a judge, a building inspector, hell, the dogcatcher. I can't do that in cash, and I can't do it "in kind"-paying for things on their behalf or that benefit them even if I never directly give them the cash.
If it's not a violation of free speech to say you can't directly or indirectly bribe those officials, it's not a violation to say you can't directly or indirectly bribe others. I can still speak on their behalf until I'm blue in the face-I just can't buy them a Super Bowl commercial. Nor can I use my newspaper or TV company to stump for them, any more than a newspaper could give free classifieds for a year to the local fire marshal in exchange for, or hopes of, "forgetting" the fire inspection. That's not free speech. It's bribery.
As to corporations, they're artificial entities, not people. Each individual who works for a corporation retains full speech rights, but the corporation itself should have no such.
Some sort of national initiative/referendum process, perhaps? Many states have it, and while imperfect in its own ways, it does tend to keep in check the worst abuses. Of course, sometimes people pass spectacularly popular but spectacularly stupid laws, too.
But the main thing to that is to get corporate cash the hell out of politics. Amend the Constitution to specify that corporations are not "persons" with the same rights as real people, including the right to participation in the political process. Then stop allowing candidates for office to take brib-erm, excuse me, "campaign contributions". Each viable candidate gets to speak using the same platform in the same manner. One person one vote, not one dollar one vote.
While whoever marked you troll is probably on the money, a lot of people probably might wonder why this would be significant.
It's hard to geolocate many IP addresses with any degree of precision, especially one you got months ago. And even if you can, it's not like they ever make their money back on these cases-even if they win, most of the defendants are going to go bankrupt. They won't make enough money in their life to pay the exorbitant judgment. Filing these in every district in the country, refiling the ones where you "missed", etc., is going to run up the legal bills very quickly. In the meantime, you're going to continue to annoy judges by clogging up their dockets with cases intended to "make an example" of Little Johnny or Grandma. And while an annoyed judge still must follow the law, they can certainly do as this judge did-choose to follow it very strictly indeed.
On what grounds, exactly?
Contrary to what some people think (and admittedly, contrary to how some of them act), judges are not gods who can just do whatever the hell they want. If the judge in this case issued an order like that, there would be a stay on it from the next court up faster than you could blink. And since there would be no legal grounds underpinning it, it would then be solidly overturned on appeal while the temporary stay kept it from ever having any effect anyway. Since this subpoena is against a specific person, not HP as a company, there are no grounds for the judge to take action against HP. They can't order your family imprisoned to try and force you to show up for court, either. You can't just take action against people or organizations related to someone because they're related.
Honestly, my first question is, is it Google or the German government ignoring the law here? I'm not entirely familiar with German law, granted, and it does have some oddities, but I'm not certain under what legal theory an "opt out" right could be created. If I took a photo of some friends on a public street in Germany and posted it on a website, with a home in the background, would the homeowner have the right under German law to demand I blur the home or take down the photo? And if they wouldn't, what's the difference here? I know in the US and most countries with similar legal structures, photos taken from a public street of the street-facing part of a building are not presumed to be a violation of the right to privacy, as anyone walking down that street can see it. What's the significant difference here?
Actually, they very well might.
If they're not willing to take a stand on this, most of their customers probably don't know the difference. If they do decide to stand up, they give India one of two choices:
So yes, in this case, they do serve their customers well by calling what's likely a bluff. India is desperate for development. They're not going to alienate their elite over something like this.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind too much seeing that. It's probably past time we got over the idea that ideas and concepts can be "owned" by someone. And I wouldn't exactly call Thomas Jefferson an extremist, either.
But that aside, copyright law in the case of the GPL is being used as the solution, where in the other scenario it's the problem. Why couldn't patents be used the same way? That's not hypocritical, any more than it's hypocritical to use a gun to defend yourself if someone's trying to kill you with one.
If everyone used software patents with only the stipulation that source couldn't be closed if they were used, they wouldn't be "evil". Unfortunately, they're not used that way.
It's similar to the GPL. Locking down software under draconian EULAs is the problem. Using the copyright system "against itself" is the solution. No different with patents. A Mutually Assured Destruction scenario would sure make a closed source company think twice before pulling out the patent artillery against an open source project.
FOSS often requires that the recipient share alike. There's nothing anti-FOSS in saying "You may use this software, but anything you use it in must have full source code released under the same open source license as this project." That's already commonly done with licenses like the GPL-you can't, for example, use the Linux kernel as the basis for a closed-source kernel. Using patent law in addition to copyright would, if anything, make that more common, and give a "strike back" option against those who attempt to use patent law against FOSS-whoever does so probably will have by then violated an open source patent in their closed source software.
Erm, that's the opposite of what I said. That may work in markets with low barriers to entry and large numbers of genuinely different competitors, but there are fewer and fewer of those. For the most part, barriers to entry are high, and most people have access to one giant quasi-monopoly, or maybe a few giant oligopolies. Regulation absolutely has its place there.
If you want to regulate in such a way that meaningful competition is allowed by lowering the entry barrier, such as mandatory linesharing at reasonable rates, I'm actually alright with that. In some cases, that may even be a better case than direct regulation of what the existing players may and may not do (though even then, there probably have to be some "lines in the sand").
But no, overall, it's not the "land of opportunity" for whoever says to themselves "All the cell companies suck. I'll go do better than all of them." I can't go do that, even if my idea really is superior to anything they're doing, because the barrier to entry in terms of initial cash required is so high. Can you?
How about if I'm a "voting customer", who will happily take my money elsewhere if someone tries to screw me?
And if there are so few choices and they all (in reality or in fact) collude, by making changes in lockstep, that's exactly what regulation is for. So no, it is not only shareholders who have a vote-ultimately, the public can veto anything the shareholders decide, through exactly that mechanism, and that's much more likely to happen if the company makes people unhappy on a regular basis and does not respond to negative feedback by scrapping or changing what it planned to do. The ability of those shareholders to be shareholders with highly limited liability is the result of a corporate charter granted by the government, and thus also the people. If the company starts to abuse that charter by utilizing a large market share to charge more and offer less, the people have every right to modify, limit, or revoke that license to operate with limited liability, and to define boundaries outside of which the company may not step.
It absolutely sickens me to see "No, just shareholders! Shareholders! Screw the customers, the employees, and the public!" Giving customers something they'll want to keep even when their contract is up, keeping employees happy so they will stay long-term, and maintaining a good reputation with the public are all part of the long-term viability of a company. You're ultimately hurting even the shareholders when you piss them all off for a short-term quarterly boost.
No thought crime in my society, thank you, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. I am one of the few who will say so, because of the hysteria surrounding the issue. But please do not presume to speak for "pretty much everyone", because you don't.
Would I like it not to exist? Sure, given the choice, I'd prefer it didn't. But do I support outlawing it? Absolutely not. Abusing children should absolutely be against the law, but having an image being a crime? Not a crime. If having a copy of Lolita is not a crime, having a copy of such images should not be. And I'd far rather see neither be a crime, than both.
Ultimately, I would like to see it not be illegal to possess any writing, image, video, or concept of any type. The making of some, of course, might be illegal, but simple possession would not. The only way we'll eliminate this crap is if we eliminate the idea that simple possession of information can be inherently bad.
Because the right to speak freely is a fundamental right, and you cannot always (in law or in fact) always speak freely if you cannot sometimes speak anonymously.
It is, of course, on the reader to judge the reliability of anonymous or pseudonymous information. But that certainly does not mean that anonymous or pseudonymous speech should be prohibited altogether. What if it's not even the government prohibiting your speech? What if your employer, family, what have you, would not like what you're saying or doing on the Net? Should you then just be prohibited, in essence, from being able to publicly speak that way?
In the United States, a lot of the early anti-England tracts and pamphlets were published anonymously or under a pseudonym. I would say for a pretty good reason. We don't need "Papers please!" in real life, and we sure in the hell don't need it online.